Probably another stupid question about LNBs (Price/performance)!

[jallen01]

Evening all

At the moment, I've got a Raven Gemini 90 with 4x LNBs for the major birds at 28/23/19/13E.

Now I want to move one old 70cm dish around from 30W to cover a bit further West than the Gemini, and then fit ANOTHER 90cm dish (the GT-Sat one I mentioned in another thread) to try further East than the Gemini because it has better sight of that part of the sky - and I want to fit 3 or 4 LNBs to each of those, so that's a lot of LNBs, but I only have 5 or 6 current spares!
(BTW: in case anyone wonders how I'm going to "get away" with all these dishes (+ the 60cm for Sky!), they are all ground/pole mounted between my neighbour's garage and mine, and look over the top of the latter or over my greenhouse, and, because of this location, only the one at the house end and the Sky dish at the other end of the row can be partially seen by anybody outside my garden :D)

Anyway, to the question, as I said, I will now be needing some more LNBs, but nothing I think too special (at least for the moment) and so suggestions for some singles that are cheap (less than a tenner each, preferably a fiver - I am a pensioner- and the extra dishes cost virtually SFA because they were give-aways or reclamation site finds :D!) and work reasonably well would be appreciated.

This whole will be running through a couple of Diseqc switches and controlled by my diddy little new Icecrypt receiver via Disqeqc 1.1.

BTW, these LNBs won't be fitted to the steerable dish which is also at the house end of the row and can be seen by a few neighbours (it's been there years and no-one has complained :D) - and even then it is nowhere near as blatently obvious as the veritable ranks of dishes along some of the streets around here, as that will be treated to a decent LNB in due course for a bit of feed-hunting and the like.

[jallen01]

Well, as no-one has been able to respond to my "stupid" question, I obviously did a bit more digging myself.

That seemed to conclude that it is a "battle" between the Inverto Black Ultra and the Technomate TM1 in various versions. The Gold used to appear the best, but now that TM appear to not differentiate between the various "sub-versions" of the TM1 by colour, then it looks a bit of a lottery as to which one you would actually.

I currently have a brand new one with a black body and a yellow-green cap, so I wonder which one that might be?

So, what are your current views of the "battle"?

PS: again, with reference to my original question, both the Inverto and the TM appear to be widely available for less than a tenner.

[digicon]

The Inverto Eco Green LNB retails for around £6 from a certain ******* place, Have used these in the past with surprising results for the price.

Out of the TM LNB's try to stick with the Blue Body coloured one TM-1 and not the Gold, dont ask me why but the TM-1 performs slightly better

[jallen01]

Digicon

Thanks

From past experience (some time ago!) Technomate is a relatively "known quantity" for me (60cm dish for Sky has its 2nd TM twin on it and locks the channels in almost any weather conditions including torrential rain, although the 1st TM twin did fail after about 4yrs so that was slightly worrying).


This article (http://tele-audiovision.com/TELE-satellite-0911/eng/technomate.pdf)on another website outlines the old body-colour regime and how the 4 different coloured versions varied.

However, this customer review (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Technomate-0-1db-Universal-Unknown-Binding-Black-Yellow/dp/B003M8PEM6) on Amazon says that TM now only supply LNBs with black bodies with yellow caps (and mine has that colour combo) - so you don't actually know which version you get and the Blue ones, as such, are probably no longer available.

Given that situation, the TM is what I'll try first (together with the old Sharp White that does still work as that is a long-necked LNB) and buy some more if that approach works out..