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That video claiming mesh dishes work just as good as solid ones got me thinking
I was watching some DIY satellite channel last night and this guy swore up and down that a mesh dish works the same as a solid one. He was pointing at his setup saying the signal penetrates just fine and it saves on wind load. Man, I tried a mesh dish back in 2019 for a Ku band project on my roof in Phoenix and I got maybe half the channels I was expecting. The wind load thing is nice I guess, but the signal loss on anything below 30 degrees elevation was brutal. Maybe the tech has improved since then or maybe he lives somewhere with stronger satellites but I'm not buying it. Has anyone else here actually compared mesh vs solid on the same LNB and got similar results?
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max_brown1mo agoOG Member
Buddy of mine tried that and got barely anything on rainy days.
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keith_bennett1mo ago
That 30 degree elevation thing was my exact problem too. @max_brown I bet his buddy's rainy day loss was even worse than what I got with the mesh in Phoenix during monsoon season. Did you swap back to solid or just ditch the whole project?
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evan_cooper731mo ago
Heat is the thing nobody brings up. Solid dishes absorb direct sun and the LNB can actually drift out of focus on a hot day, but that mesh lets most of the infrared pass right through. In Phoenix where it hits 115, my solid dish would lose lock around 2PM because the receiver couldn't handle the temp swing, but the mesh stayed stable. Problem is that same openness that helps with heat also lets weak signals leak right through, especially on the edge of a beam. The physics is a tradeoff, not a straight upgrade or downgrade.
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