Agreed, The fastest way we have found is to mount a scope to the dish. The McCown one should work really well. We made our own version of that due to way the Jirous dishes are constructed, but the McCown one is like a little more durable than ours and more of a single person usable type of thing. With that set up, you might not even have to tweak the link. We just did three more links yesterday with Mimosa B11s, one was bang on at -42, the other two we had to fine tune for less than 5 minutes. In the last couple of weeks, we did 10 other links and 7 of them we didn’t even have to touch to fine tune, they were within 2-3 dBi of target right way when linked up. A couple of things we found that really helped:
1. Get a small pair of binoculars to find the other tower first on longer links. This helps you get close first, the scope is so zoomed in, it takes awhile to find the other tower some times. 2. Know what your tilt is before going up as you mentioned below, and then if you can find a part of the bracket that is square to the face of the dish, use the iHandy app (or a similar one) on the smart phone to set tilt to the right value before setting azimuth. This has cut the time down quite a bit as well. With the Jirous dishes, we can now get our alignment time down on one end to less than 10 minutes from the time the dish is attached to the pipe. We get the mounting bracket pinched down tight with the dish aimed in the general direction, then set tilt with the smartphone, then dial in azimuth with the scope. If you are using only Jirous dishes, I can send you what we built, but I think Chuck’s setup is more universal and more durable. We use vise grips to clamp the scope to the dish, which is more of a 3 hands rather than 2 hands kind of thing. I think Chuck’s could be done more easily with one person. We do have two setups thinking we would have to have folks on both ends at the same time, but since these get so close as Bill mentioned, you can do it from one end and be pretty confident you won’t have to revisit that end most of the times. We have tried smartphone apps and all kinds of compasses to set azimuth and found they just aren’t accurate at all. The binoculars cuts the initial tower acquisition time down for longer links dramatically, however, many of our links are under 10 miles and we don’t really need the binoculars for them. Regards, David Coudron From: Af <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jaime Solorza Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2018 1:14 PM To: Animal Farm <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Alignment idea Guess I will have buy one then...thanks Jaime Solorza On Sat, Apr 28, 2018, 12:04 PM Bill Prince <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: The easiest way I've found to align a link was with the McCown scope thingy. I was able to align a 10 mile 11 GHz link all by my lonesome. Not quite plug and play, but it was operational within a couple dB of optimal when I powered it on. I also did a 7.5 mile link that was dead-on when I powered it on (again, all by myself). bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com> On 4/28/2018 11:00 AM, Jaime Solorza wrote: Wondering if anyone has used lets say a 5GHz antenna and radio attached above an 11GHz antenna to find a good starting point for aligning 11GHz quicker. we have azimuth and elevation coordinates, we have found some good landmarks on paths to get good of idea of path..... I have three links to align next week and need to get is asap....lots of other projects and quotes I need to get done. I did find a low cost USB SA from Trarchy for $995.00 that goes from 4.0 to 13.xGHz that looks interesting. My SA only goes to 6GHz.. anyways any other tips would be appreciated. Jaime Solorza Wireless Systems Architect 915-861-1390
