under construction.  

ASSEMBLY and INSTALLATION of new SAMI DISH. 
          
Most of what's shown below, was actually done prior to removing the Orbitron dish, and moving the old pole/concrete ball.  I wanted to basically align the mount prior to putting it up on the pole, so that all I would need to do was to rotate the whole mount on the pole to find the sats, then fine tune the elevation and mount on pole very slightly to finish the alignment.

When I pulled the mount out of the box (very heavy), I decided to first try to set the declination on the mount.  (I recommend the so called "modified declination".)  Basically, to set the declination, you need two surfaces on the mount, one parallel to the rotation axis, and one perpindicular to the aim of the dish, and measure the angle between those  two surfaces.  On the SAMI mount with the 36" ring, the rotation axis is inside the square tube that the carpenter's square is measuring to below, and the wooden board is across part of the ring is perpindicular to the dish aim.  What I tried to do was to measure the distance between the board and the square tube at 2 different points 10" apart, then the difference between those two measurements divided by the 10" is the tangent of the declination angle.  I first calculated the difference in measurements I needed, then adjusted the two big shiney bolts at the right to adjust the declination. Later, I found a slightly more accurate way of doing this, without crushing my trash can.
           
  
   
THEN, I decided to set the ring upside down on 3 wooden blocks.  I connected an old actuator to keep the mount part in place. 
         

  
The actuator didn't have the motor on, which exposed the drive slot, so I put a wooden dowel in a hand drill, and put a small bolt through the end of the dowel that could fit into the drive slot of the actuator, so that I could drive the actuator in and out with the power drill.  (If you do this with an acutator you're using, make sure you return the actuator to the same point it was at when you took the motor off, or else the limit switches won't be adjusted correctly.) 
        

  
Anyway, first, I drove the actuator to it's retracted position (without moving the saddle clamp on the actuator), and checked the rotation angle.   This angle is related to the 90 degrees minus the actual angle around the rotation axis, sometimes referred to as the USALS angle on small motorized Ku systems. 
        

  
The indicated 4.3 deg was way too small, and would correspond to aiming below the horizon, so I calculated the angle needed to give me an elevation needed to see the lowest sat visible from my location, which turned out to be around 20 deg, which corresponds to a 70 deg USALS angle.  I then slid the saddle clamp on the actuator to give me approximately the 20 deg angle.
        

  
THEN, I decided to see how far this 24" actuator would take this particular mount on extension.
        

  
The above image shows that the 24" extension was more than enough to take this mount as far as it can go without modifying the mount's mounting points.  The above illustrates why some people destroy actuators by trying to drive their dish too far.  Obviously, the actuator could drive the dish this far, however when the actuator tries to pull the dish back, it will be exerting an incredible force on the actuator, and will often pull the insides out of the actuator before it will move the dish.  This is because the angle is so small that almost all the force is applied perpindicular to the direction you are trying to make the connection point on the dish move.  Ie, to pull the dish back, the connection point to the left (off the image) would have to move nearly straight up, and yet the actuator is pulling it horizontally.  If that angle gets close to zero, you'd have to destroy either the mount or the actuator for the actuator to retract, and usually the actuator fails.   But anyway, I demonstrated that the actuator was capable of sending the dish fairly far past vertical, although I intend to set software limits to keep it from getting as far as pictured above.

Then,  below, I found an alternative, probably better way to measure/adjust the declination.  Here, I have the ring, which is perpindicular to the dish aim on the wooden blocks, horizontal, zero angle, and I put the angle meter on the square tube, which is the rotation axis.  The angle measured is the declination angle. Set to the appropriate angle for my latitude.
        

  
FINALLY, below, I set the angle meter on the part of the mount that goes onto the pole, so that the angle measured corresponds to the elevation of my true south satellite.   Adjusted this with the big bolt to the left of the level.
        
With this set, it SHOULD be just a matter of putting the mount on the pole, putting the dish on the mount, then rotate the mount so it is pointing south, and I should see satellites. 



At this point, I put the mount in the bucket of my tractor, and put the mount on the pole.
So, the NEXT step was to actually assemble the dish itself.  Sorry.... I forgot to take pictures of this.
I had intended to put the 4 dish sections up on the mount, one by one, which was what I did with my first SAMI dish, some 20 years ago,  however the instructions said to put the dish together on a flat surface and THEN put it up on the mount. So I decided to follow the instructions.  ???  
The 4 sections bolted together, and also were bolted to the two circular center plates, one plate above, and one below the mesh sections.  The first 3 sections went together fine, but to get the bolts into the center plate on the last section, you have to be UNDER the dish, and to connect the nuts, you have to be above the dish where you can't reach. Also, you couldn't even reach the 2 bolts closest to the center holding that last section to the other sections... so it turned out that there was NO WAY to follow the instructions.  I ended up connecting the bolts that I could reach at the edge, then lifted the dish up on edge to connect the bolts at the center, but even that was hard for one person to do.  But I got it connected.  THEN, however, it was too big and clumsy for me to get it out of my garage by myself, so I had to ask my wife to help me tilt and carry it through the garage door, and put it up on the mount, so now I can't say that I did it all by myself.   :-) 

HOWEVER, once I got the dish up, I ran into yet one more problem.  The next step was to connect the feedhorn support arms.  With my FIRST SAMI, I was able to tilt the dish different directions, and was able to reach the points where the arms connected, so I had planned to do that with this new SAMI.    I first tipped the dish all the way over to the east side.....   (I had hoped that the orange straps would support the dish and keep it from going all the way but that didn't work).
    


With the dish turned to the east, I connected the arms I could reach from that side.  (Sorry, fuzzy picture due to fog/humidity and poor lighting)



I thought that at this point I could connect the other two arms by moving the dish over to the west.



Unfortunately, I could only reach one more arm.  The last arm was way at the top.. With my OLD SAMI, I was able to reach it by releasing the elevation rod, and tilting the dish over on it's back, but with this mount, it was obvious that this wouldn't be enough to let me reach the connection point.  So I brought up my tractor again. 



I got up into the bucket, and used a stick to push the hydraulic lever to lift me up to where I could reach the connection point.  Was a bit flakey since there is a hydraulic leak on my bucket, and it keeps drifting down, so I had to keep pushing the lift lever every minute or so, but it worked fine. 



Next, above, I set up my feedhorn.  Had to remove old Orbitron plastic plate, put on the SAMI plastic plate, and I wanted to switch one of my LNBs, so I set up a temporary table with a piece of plywood on a wheelbarrow.  (Sorry picture foggy due to fogged lens... humid morning.)



Finally, feedhorn connecte, and temporarily connected my old actuator again, since I could move the dish with the hand drill as before.  Cables all hooked up temporarily routed, and ready to find sats.   I was in a hurry to find a satellite that I'd be watching football on the next day, so I just turned the dish to where I had previously determined that sat would be.  At first I didn't find the sat, but then I found that somehow I had rotated the feedhorn 90 deg, so all my H polarities were V, and visa-versa.  Once I corrected the polarity, I found the sat, and made some temporary fine tune adjustments to get the sat for my NFL game.   I'll finish the alignment next week.   :-) 


UPDATE....   Welllll.....  things didn't work out _QUITE_ as well as I had hoped.     The in-the-garage pre-alignment got the alignment close enough to find the sats, but it wasn't a very good alignment.  After playing with it a bit more, it seemed apparent that the problem was that some of the surfaces I used to set angles weren't quite flat enough and parallel or perpendicular enough with the rotation axis and aim of dish.  Once the dish was up, I found some better ways of placing my digital level on the rotation axis so that it isn't influenced by some bumps caused by welds.  This allowed me to get the rotation axis elevation a bit better.  Then, I re-adjusted the two big bolts to get the declination closer to what it should be.  Tried the thing again, and it was pretty close, but still not perfect.  I can track C, and Ku across the arc.  Ku is better than it was with my old Orbitron, but not as good as I get with my 90cm Primestar dish.  It's about the same as my 90cm Fortec.  Ku SHOULD be better than it is, however, so I still have some work to do.  I think my next step is to get the ladder up to the feedhorn and make sure the focal distance is peaked.
   I've had to put off further work on this temporarily, however, due to a series of failures of other components, like coax cables, diseqC switches, and the motor that runs my Fortec dish, plus I needed to do some work burying the coax prior to winter, as I had cables laying all over the ground in an area where I drive snowmobiles and ATVs.  Hope to get back to this soon, and when I do, I'll add more pictures.