multi-dish, dish?

slightly related to my last question but not realy as ive relegated all digital equipment to the UK (apart from the orbit system which shall remain in Bahrain doing what it was installed to do).

has anyone managed to install a multi-dish....dish?
in otherwords, is there a way to set up say, four 80 cm sat dishes to give the effecttive power of a larger dish (say 200cm).
Ive been reading into this who sat thing and im getting really into it!!

it an interesting idea, but trying to use a lot of smaller dishes would introduce more noise into the signal than using a single dish of the size you are trying to emulate, in my view

By noise are you refering to the extra cables and LNB pickup noise? (im still learning but getting there)

I agree that its prob a bit of a silly idea as youll need to sync the signal from all the dishes into one single stream in order for a digital reciever to decode the signal, But surely there is some software equivalent (i know there is hardware that is able to do this - think SETI) out there in the wild. If not, i might have to think about trying to make my own once i get out of university and have an income lmao.

LAGMonkey said:

By noise are you refering to the extra cables and LNB pickup noise? (im still learning but getting there)

I agree that its prob a bit of a silly idea as youll need to sync the signal from all the dishes into one single stream in order for a digital reciever to decode the signal, But surely there is some software equivalent (i know there is hardware that is able to do this - think SETI) out there in the wild. If not, i might have to think about trying to make my own once i get out of university and have an income lmao.

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All I know is that the nearer to the deck the LNB is then the more noise you pick up so suggest you get them as high as poss,other thing being that you willstill only get I imagine the same amount of signal to a particular dish therefore always go for the biggest you can,sometime a primefocus is better than an offset, or maybe getone that will pick up on a small dish to reflect onto a large one think those were called Gilbiltan or something like that Digi will know.

yes by noise i mean electrical noise introduced by all the additional components, cables, switching gear etc

gibertini make a dish where the LNB sits facing away from the main dish and it reflects the signal twice, but its still an 80 cm dish

'digital' is noughts and ones. You still collect the same 'noughts and ones' from the air using 4 x 80cm or 1x 80cm or even 100 x 80cm. Unfortunately you cant add the noughts and ones together (you get 2's 3's and fours lol), if there are not enough noughts and ones for a picture then you need more signal- usually by getting a bigger dish.

I have worked with 4 dishes for 1 satellite and you can get some gains but its to do with less interferance and cleaner signal rather than making more signal from nowhere. Hope that helps.

Thanks, i must have been thinking along the lines of analogue systems.

Get two wavelengths and then superimpose them together and you get a bigger system. I was under the impresson that a sat system used a form of amplitude modulation in order to provide the nessiccary highs and lows in the signal that would equate to 0s and 1s.
As long as the differential between the highs (1s) and lows (0s) was big enough my thinking was that you could then pull a binary datastreem out of the combined sat stream (spread over 4 dish's and then linked together).

Im not sure if ive made any sence tho.

at the end of the day it would still be a lot easier and less confusing to just get one big dish to start with