How do USALS work?

[Bigredneck]

I don't understand how the USUALS work. I have a 33" Ku dish I have set several satellites by " store position", but don't understand USUALS setting.

[lonster1]

With usals, you enter your lat and long and the dish moves to each sat without the need
to store positions.

IMO it is a much nicer setup than Diseq

[purriocity]

Just to give you the basics on how usals work.Lets say sat 82 is your true south.You would line up that sat and have your dish and motor at the zero degree mark for that sat and enter in the info lonster mentioned.After that you store that position.Now if you want to go to a different sat you go into sat setting and enable usals for each and tell your motor to drive to that location.So if you want to go to sat 129 your motor will add 47 degrees to the right and move there.If you want to go to sat 61.5 your sat will minus 20.5 degrees and such.Just remember that when you use usals to disable the motor before scanning for the first time on each sat and then save location and enable usals after.Hope this helps and gives you an idea of how it works

[Bigredneck]

Yea. I think I understand, my true south is @ near 93w I think. I'll give it a try.
Thanks.

[purriocity]

Yea. I think I understand, my true south is @ near 93w I think. I'll give it a try.
Thanks.google dishpointer and it will show you what your settings and true south are

[Terryl]

One other thing with USALS that is not shown in the manuals, is it's resolution, and that's only .1 degrees, if the setting is lets say 90.1 by 110.1, and your really at 90.05 by 110.05, that's 50 hundredths of a degree of great arc off.

That doesn't sound like much, and that may not be a problem at some locations, if the dish that is being used has a wide enough receive beam width, and the location is close enough to the X.1 by Y.1 mark , but I have found that it is a problem at some locations around my area, I have to manually move the dish a few clicks of the remote (move dish East/West) to get them lined up for a good signal.


A tenth of a degree is not very much down here, but remember your shooting at a satellite the size of a mini van that is 22,500 miles away, .05 degrees error down here could miss that satellite by a few hundred miles. (I don't remember the actual distance)


So in using the USALS function you may have to jockey the dish around a bit to get a good signal, it's not always going to line right up with all satellites.

And when using a motorized system you have to be absolutely sure your mounting mast is vertical, front to back, left to right, or you will miss satellites at ether end of the arc.