After years of occasional interest and research on this subject, I decided to finally take the plunge and invest some time and money into this hobby. Over the years I have been collecting various LNBFs and dishes. Sometimes picking up used equipment from various satellite shops. This was not easily done because FTA is not near as prevalent as the popular Dish Network or DirecTV equipment is. In fact, most of the time when I call around to local satellite shops no one has any clue of what I'm talking about when I mention FTA. Occasionally, I will run across an old school C-band satellite technician who seems to know a thing or two on the subject - but that is rare. This is one of the reasons why I blog about it here, to provide the information that I have ran across that has helped me and I will document it here. My Setup (Phase I - pre-Primestar motor modification)

My setup at this point consists of two dishes. One of the dishes is a DirecWay Dish of 39X23 inches. It has circular LNBFs pointed at Echostar 110W, 119W, and 148W. It also has a single linear LNBF pointed at Galaxy 10R at 123W.

The other dish is a Primestar Dish of 36X26 inches. At the time of this photo it had a single LNBF pointed at Galaxy 25 at 97W. I have recently installed a motor for this dish to allow reception of multiple satellites instead of just one. You will see these photos towards the end of this post.

The various photos below show views of how I modified the Primestar and DirecWay dishes. On the DirecWay dish I removed the transmitter/reciever combination LNBF and replaced it with a standard linear LNBF and used A/C duct / water pipe strapping to secure the LNBF to the satellite dish arm. I used the same strapping to mount the LNBF on the Primestar dish as well.

My Setup at Phase II (post-Primestar motor modification) Now that I have added an SG-2100 dish motor, I had to modify the Primestar dish a little bit. As you can see it sits a little bit lower than the previous pictures. The photos below show how I removed the dish mount and placed it upside-down in order to mount it to the motor. I also had to add a 2" radiator hose to go over the 50mm motor tube accessory in order to fill the gap between the motor tube and dish mount.

My setup NOW at Phase III This is my most recent setup at the moment. Hopefully it will stay like this for a while. The exception I suppose would be when I get the BUD mounted up and operational. If you notice on the Primestar dish you will see that I removed the LNB bar on the motorized dish and also removed the circular LNBF that was on there. I replaced it with the Invacom Quad (2 circular, 2 linear LNBFs) to feed both my Pansat 3500SD as well as my Twinhan 1020a PC card. On the DirecWay dish you will see that I added a dual LNBF instead of a single feed. This way I can also feed both my receiver and PC card.

The rest of these shots basically show the mounting design of pipe strapping and bolts as well as the cabling and switches involved.

Below you will see the equipment and the list of birds I'm receiving with my setup: Pansat 3500SD with a 22khz Ecoda feeding 2 @ DiseqC 4x1 WinXP with a Vision Plus Twinhan 1020a and a DiseqC 4x1 DN 6000 HD only to use the OTA card for local Hi-Def Modified Dish: DirecWay receiving 110,119,123,148 Modified Dish: Primestar and Invacom Quad with SG-2100 motor receiving 129,127,121,118,116,113,111,107,105,103,101,99,97, 95,93,91,89,87,85,83,82,79,74,72,61 6' BUD laying on the ground until I get it mounted up... More to come later...