What is the difference between Round and Oval dishes?
Round dishes are the simplest. They point at one place in the sky. For DTV, this is 101W, of course. All the main DTV channels are sent from here. Quite a lot of local channels are sent from here as well. So, what’s the oval dish for? The oval dish actually see a range of positions. See, the signal coming from the sky looks almost like a point source. Imagine a bunch of lines drawn from a point in space to your round dish. The lines are all parallel, so when they hit your dish, they bounce in different directions. Your round dish is a curve, so all those lines bounce to come together. The point where they all come to is where the LNB is. It’s at the focal point. The oval dish, however, doesn’t focus in one place, but several. You don’t point the oval dish at 101W or at 119W (DirecTV’s two major orbital locations). Actually, you point it at 110W, a point directly in between. Now, imagine the lines coming from 101W. The dish isn’t pointing at 101W, but the lines still hit it. But, they r
