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TIL I was aiming my dish all wrong for 6 months. A guy on YouTube showed me the right way to use a compass.
I used to just point the dish roughly south and wiggle it around until I got a signal. Took forever and I'd lose channels every time the wind blew. Last month I watched a video where someone explained you gotta account for magnetic declination in your area. I'm in Portland so that's like 14 degrees off. I adjusted my mount and locked onto a satellite in under 10 minutes. Now I get 30 more channels than before. Has anyone else tried using a proper azimuth calculation and seen a big jump in signal quality?
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phoenix5732mo ago
...and honestly I feel like this is one of those things where if you don't know you don't know, but it's not like my life changed that much. I mean yeah I got a few extra channels but half of them are just infomercials and shopping networks anyway. The whole magnetic declination thing sounds impressive but in my experience as long as the dish is vaguely pointing at the sky you'll get something. Maybe I'm just lucky with my location but I've never had to whip out a calculator to watch TV.
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brianm662mo ago
Wait, are you saying you'd get the same result holding a compass in Portland versus Miami, or is there an actual difference?
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gray8752mo ago
Ngl, you're right that it's location based but the effect is way bigger than people think. Out in the Pacific Northwest the declination can be like 15 degrees east which is enough to miss a satellite completely if you're eyeballing it. Portland definitely needs the adjustment while Miami is close enough to zero where you could get away with pointing vaguely south.
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