My wife and I don't camp frequently enough to justify the cost of a fancy rooftop, fully-automatic satellite dish setup, so I recently purchased a tripod-mounted satellite television dish kit (Directv SWiM Mobile RV Portable Dish Tripod Kit) which requires manual setup. Although I've looked at several Youtube videos on setting up a campground dish, the online reviews of signal meters which one can use to optimize the direction of the dish are discouraging. Does anyone have experience and recommendations on signal meters used for this purpose?
I first started out aiming my tripod mounted dish with a $10 analog signal strength meter I bought o Amazon. It was a PITA to use, but it did get the job done. Months later, I did invest in a $50 digital meter that identifies which satellite the dish is aimed on the LNB I select, which makes aiming much more accurate and faster. Unfortunately, that meter is no longer available. The point though, is that even the cheap meters can get the job done with practice if you don't want to invest several hundred dollars in the current recommended professional level meters.
My "meter" is rather unorthodox: I purchased a used (very cheap) HR-44 receiver (similar to what is in my RV) to show me the Signal Strength for the 101, 99, and 103 satellites. The receiver does not have a valid DirecTV card because I'm not using it to actually receive/watch TV. The HR-44 has a Video-Out (yellow) jack, and I feed that video (only) into a Garmin 7200 (using its video-input function).
