Mesh Dish Hail Damage? FYI

[Lone Gunman]

I've got two mesh dishes that are listed in my signature. Last week we had a "killer" storm and enough hail to turn the ground white! Whenever we get these storms I usually try to point these dishes as far west as I can to help minimize the damage. Well, the wind was blowing westward so hard that the hail was actually going sideways as much as down and both my dishes got damaged pretty badly, especially across the bottom half. Only saving grace was that the hail was only like 5/16" in diameter. If that stuff would have been say half an inch and up it would likely have completely destroyed the mesh.

So the next day I did some checking from some info I had written down a year or so ago on both systems, ie, had gone to 3 satellites in the arc, east, west and in the middle and had recorded specific TP S and Q number for just such an occasion as this. Well, I went to these reference Sats/TPs and guess what? THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN S AND Q, EVEN AFTER THAT KILLER HAIL STORM??? Not sure I understand this but hey, I'll take it!

I guess I'm lucky though as 60 miles west of me they got golf ball size hail that tore siding off, horked up roof shingle and broke windows not to mention the damage to any vehicles that were exposed to it. I guess no matter how bad things might seem, there's usually someone that's worse off!

 

[toucan-man]

Great post, great information. Am glad the golf balls didn't get you.

 

[migold]

We had that storm here also, there was pea sized hail that fell for quite a while and covered the yard about an inch deep. We were watching the Encore Westerns channel on 105W using an offset LNBF on the dish aimed at 99W. I got a second of pixelation when the storm hit, but never any more. We had no damage to the dishes either, my mesh was aimed at 91W. My neighbor lost his old willow tree to the wind. We were lucky also!!!

 

[RT-Cat]

Ouch! That has hurt. Lumpy spots in your dish. Good to read they are still working.
RT.

 

[KE4EST]

Glad it only hurt the esthetics of it even though that sucks too. Nice to know though that you are still running the same signal wise.

 

[kodaz]

can't those dents be taken out with a rubber mallet and block?
i have some similar dents i was curious about.

 

[AJV]

I did with my 7.5 ft Unimesh, and seems to work fine. I even have a rip in the screen when putting it up it the wrong way.

AJV

 

[rrob311]

Thats good everything still works. What do you think of your 7.5 sami dish? How is the performance of the 7.5 size? Is there any channels that you can't get on the popular sats?

 

[Lone Gunman]

can't those dents be taken out with a rubber mallet and block?
i have some similar dents i was curious about.

I have straightened out a single panel on my SAMI that was damaged pretty bad with a large rubber mallet but I took the mesh off and hammered it on the flat concrete floor in my shop. That one worked great. What I've got now it a BUNCH of small dents. I can push some of them from the back side and take them out but that usually winds up warping the mesh a bit. There's so many now I'm at a loss on where to begin. Bad thing about the Winegard mesh is that it's captured and I'm not sure I can even remove that to try to straighten it.

But hey, as long as it's working as well as it was, I think I'll just leave it alone.

 

[Lone Gunman]

Thats good everything still works. What do you think of your 7.5 sami dish? How is the performance of the 7.5 size? Is there any channels that you can't get on the popular sats?

The SAMI dish works almost as well as the Winegard but to be fair, the SAMI is tweaked much better than the Windgard, which I need to spend some time on. The east end of my arc is either high or low and needs some TLC, which I'll probably do now that the weather is getting warmer.