Rain fade optimisation

Ragnarok

Donating Member
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336
Here we are often dealing with receiving marginal feeds and trying to get every last bit of signal out of our equipment. when the rain comes it can get be very annoying.

However the main cause of rain fade in my experience is rain settling on the LNB feedhorn cover or too much rain between LNB and dish.

The number of times I have gone out side during ,steady but not heavy, rain like this morning and dried off the LNB face and got the signal back is remarkable. if you have any to hand my personal favourite is to then smear silicon Greece on the cover ( silicon Greece is good for helping to maintain rubber and plastic while repealing rain) but WD40 is a good as well as GT 85 for a rain repellent too. The in fact I did it this morning with the moto GP feed on. it was the difference between no feed at all and back with no glitches in steady rain.

These should be absolutely brilliant to stop the rain settling on the LNB in the first place and stop the rain from entering the most vital part of the signal path, bear in mind this could be an extra wind load on your LNB arm in the wind.
. this is a decent easy project for any one into DIY.
you can actually do the same with the dish face, i give mine a coat in GT85 now and then to make rain run off better but the LNB is far more important as this. it is very cool to see rain beading up and running off rather than sticking and spreading out.

on smaller dishes,like sky dishes, I've often just inflated a bin bag and covered up the whole dish. it's surprising what a difference this makes!!


How do you guys deal with rain fade.

any other tips and tricks to deal with rain and improve reception?
 
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