After experimenting with a couple of directv slimline dishes for a few days, I came up with the following conclusions.

1) You can just pull the directv lnb off the end of the arm & center the shaw lnb in the middle of their arm & get a signal. Their dish is bigger, but it didn’t improve signal strength. I cut one arm shorter, but that didn’t improve anything.
2) I made two different adaptor plates to mount the shaw dish on the directv back-head unit. One was made by cutting the dish up & using the directv tin for the adaptor. The second adaptor was made with a piece of aluminum. There was no difference in performance or ease of use.
3) The azumith & elevation were fairly close on the directv unit, but skew had to be adjusted to get a good signal.


The purpose of the experiments was to use the directv backhead unit as it has micro-adjustments for azimuth & elevation. Once I got close to the right signal, I used a ½” socket in my cordless drill & played with those 2 adjustments to get an excellent signal in a short period of time. This is very useful when we travel & set up the portable tripod. If you can get the dishes donated ( I got 2 ), it’s an interesting project. I think the geometry is different between the 2 brands of dishes & that may account for no improvement in signal strength using the larger directv dish ( I have the 60cm shaw dish ). I tried different arm lengths & angles, but it didn’t make a difference in signal strength. If anyone tries this & gets better results than me, please let us know on here. I found the surplus dishes lying around in an rv park down south last winter.