doodman, checkout this website there's some good information at the very bottom of the page.
I use a birdog only because it's my boss' and it's the only one he has.
I like it because it's so easy to use and it's light weight.
It hangs around your neck so you have both hands available when climbing to the roof.
What's really cool is you only download the birds that you need.
Then when you're on a hot roof in 100 plus degree heat you don't have to scroll through a huge list of satelites.
On the website you select the satelites from a huge library and in a few minutes they send you an email.
It's an executable file to run on your laptop to upload into the birdog.
For me it's necessary because here in northern california I can't get all satelites into the 90 plus signal range like skyflyer007 can over in florida.
I have to actually degrade one or two signals to get all the birds into an acceptable signal strength.
What I have learned in doing
5LNB's is start with 101* because it seems to be the lowest on the horizon.
110*, 119* are the easiest to catch followed by 99*. For some unknown reason there is no 103* in the Birdog library. It doesn't matter because 103 never fails during activation. So start with 101*.
The first couple of times I installed a
5LNB I started with 110 and 119 only to realize that the reason I couldn't catch 101 was because the dish needed to be higher up so I had to unmount and remount. Doh!
Oh one last thing. During reciever setup/activation, 99* will probably fail. Just click on "continue and fix later". You will get about 5 transponders on NETWORK 14 and about 3 transponders on NETWORK 11 from sat 99*. About 97% of 99* is N/A so I guess they consider it a failure. Just be sure to tell the home owner or business owner, who no doubt will be watching, that this failure will happen before it happens.
That way, to them, you're GOLDEN.
Anyways, check it out.
[Link: prosatellitesupply.com]
