Hi there, welcome to Bucars RV. My name is JC, I’m the parts manager here and today we’re going to talk about portable satellite systems for your RV.
The reason why the market came up with a portable satellite system is due to the fact that
we all love to camp in the trees. We love to back into the trees, we like to have a fire in a nice nestled place. And the problem with that is, if you have a roof-mounted satellite similar to this one over here, you’ve got a tree in the way and all of a sudden you can’t pick up a satellite signal.
So what’s nice about a little satellite like this is you can pick it up and you can move it up to 50 feet away from your coach and you can have it on a picnic table, you can have it on the roof, you can have it on the ground, it doesn’t matter. But you can get it out into the clearing so that it can see the satellite to the southeast. The ones we carry at Bucars here, we offer the Bell as well as the Shaw, so we can pick up all the Canadian programs. The technology inside is very similar to the larger auto acquisition dishes. They’re a 15 inch equivalent dish that will automatically line up and pick up the satellite for you. in the kit when we sell it to you in the box, it’s going to come with 50 foot of coaxial cable so that you can run that and connect it to your RV to run the box and get the signal. It also comes with a power cable the power cable that comes with it is actually a 50-foot long cord with a cigarette lighter on there. So what that means to you is you can just plug it into your car, you can plug it into your RV, it doesn’t matter. It’s a 12-volt source, makes it very universal for you and the only time you plug it in, you take this out, you set it on the ground, you take your power cord and you plug it into your car. It takes about five to ten minutes for this to automatically lock on But once this is actually locked on to the satellite, you no longer have to have it plugged into the vehicle. You can unplug it from the vehicle take the power cord out and stow it away.
The only time you would ever have to plug one of these back in is if somebody came
along and accidentally bumped, it nudged it, moved it, just so it doesn’t see the satellite anymore. You just have to plug it back into the 12-volt source and will automatically pick it up again. They use two different technologies depending on if you’re Bell or if you’re Shaw. On
the Bell System, there’s not a lot of setup and on power up, it goes and it searches. But the beauty of the Bell system is if you are planning on traveling into the States, unfortunately, this will not pick up Bell in the states but it can pick up DirecTV, Dish Network all your American providers can be picked up with this satellite and that is done by just adjusting on the backhand side little dip switches like on your garage door remote. Right in the manual for this product, it gives you all the codes that you can set up so you can pick up any major satellite provider.
Now the Shaw is a little bit different. On the Shaw satellite, they have a proprietary head that allows them only to pick up the Shaw satellite signal so this is a one provider dish. Due to the fact that Shaw uses what’s called an elliptical dish which is an oblong dish to pick up the satellite, this actually needs a little bit of adjustment depending on if you’re going east or west in the country. Right on the back side of the satellite as you can see here, it has a guide of all the different degrees that you need to set your LMB at to pick up the satellite and fine tune it in that part of the country. If you’re travelling just within Alberta, you’re going to set it once you’re never going to think about it again. But if you are crossing into BC or Saskatchewan, you are gonna have to tweak your LMB a little bit just to pick up the satellite signal.
These are never going to pick up as much signal as you have on your house. Generally, when you have a dish on the side of the house, you experience anywhere from sixty to seventy-five, eighty percent signal strength. The smaller dishes like this are actually designed to operate on anywhere from 25 to 45 percent signal strength. Lots of people say hey that’s not so good. No, it’s actually fine to pick up standard definition channels. These little dishes cannot pick up HD programming so that lower signal strength doesn’t affect it a whole bunch, but due to the fact that it is only a 15-inch dish, you are kind of tied to a band in Canada. You can’t cross into the States too far and you can’t go too far north above Edmonton. Especially in
rainy weather once you get rainy weather on a dish like this it does deteriorate the signal. But for your average weekend warrior in Canada, this is an ideal product to go camping out in the backwoods, put it out on the ground so you can pick up your favourite sports team and watch movies, whatever you’d like to take your programming with you. Thank you very much for tuning in today.
