Choosing or upgrading an LNB - your opinions here!

[BGonaSTICK]

Mike22 has made a good suggestion. Lets have a thread dedicated exclusively to LNBs 

First up, I'll say this. Like most things in life - size matters. If you want better reception, get a bigger dish (assuming your alignment is already spot-on of course!)

Getting a bigger LNB won't make a blind bit of difference, however...   

Spend your money on dishes - not LNBs. Once you've gone as large as you can on the old parabolic front, then start throwing cash at LNBs. The relative value for money gains are nearly always going to favour a dish upgrade until you get up around the 1.5m mark. Beyond that, this rule starts to break down, as dish manufacturing costs start to leap up exponentially.

Back to the pointy bit. Any old LNB will actually get the job done, right?

Yes, generally it will if it's of the modern 'Universal' type. There's a lot of snobbery surrounding LNBs in my experience. The £2.99 job from Lidl does a perfectly good job and will probably give years of fault-free service on 28E, 19E, 13E etc. Don't waste your money on fancy outdoor kit if this is all you want - if your receiver can lock a signal, then that's just fine and dandy.

As a sidenote, you should also be aware that LNBs used on the ubiquitous Sky minidishes are optimised for 28E, and also for the wider-than-tall elliptical dish face configuration. Don't mix and match with regular LNBs even if you can find a mating adaptor to suit. Unless you really need to, that is 

If you're going to get serious about satellite TV reception (maybe you want to motorise?) - then think on.

Let's say you just bought the largest dish your marriage can withstand and the arguments and sulks have calmed down to the point where you feel it's safe to re-enter the lounge with the remote control. You spend hours poring over every channel on every satellite. This is a hobby. It's not necessarily about watching TV any more - scanning the skies has become fun...

Or maybe you're an ex-pat and well out of your homeland's satellite TV footprint?

Whatever the situation, you demand more from your setup, you've exhausted the possibilities of larger dishes and you have money to spend on an LNB.

Of course, getting a half decent LNB in the first place may have saved you a few quid and a trip up the ladder, but entry level LNBs are cheap nowadays. It won't really hurt anyone's pocket to retire an LNB that cost five quid, and anyway - ladder-climbing is good exercise.

The price of actually buying a replacement can be more significant though. Talking first about low-to-mid range LNBs, there are a myriad of LNBs in this price bracket - i.e. around £5 to £15. Nobody is going to spend hours discussing the merits of 'Lidl' LNBs. They work. When that ceases to be the case, throw it away and buy another. Some LNBs in the sub-£20 price range are actually pretty good though, and warrant plenty of discussion. This is the price band where most hobbyists will be looking for an LNB, and consequently where they'll be faced with the widest choice.

The trouble is, most enthusiasts don't really have the test equipment to accurately measure the performance of LNBs, let alone compare them properly. 'Tests' tend to be pretty hit and miss affairs, none under laboratory conditions and most being largely subjective. OK, that's fine. We just have to accept that's what we've got to work with.

But remember this: there isn't going to be a de facto performance table. One set of test results or experiences is unlikely to compare directly with another. Eliminating variables in the test rig is important - even if you are comparing results on the same dish. Conversely, comparing results with a mate who has a different dish on the other side of the world is going to throw several large spanners in the works.

LNBs have many different properties. They're not simply a signal funnel. LNBs 'illuminate' the dish face - in much the same way as a torch would if clamped in the LNB holder of your dish. The size and shape of this illuminated area will vary between makes and models. It ideally needs to match that of the dish face. The waveguide in the throat of the feed will have a significant effect on the quality and quantity of the signal that winds up travelling down your coax. Local Oscillators will vary in quality and stability, cross-polar isolation will vary, as will the properties of different outputs on twins and quads... and so it goes on. You can even get these variations within the same batch of LNBs from the same manufacturer!

I guess what I'm ultimately saying is that there is no proven winner or loser. No point getting up on your soapbox and shouting down the opposition. You can't mail order the seventh best LNB in the world for £14.95. You can however assimilate the experiences of others and make an educated guess as to what will work well for you. At the end of the day, if you're the obsessive type, you will still end up buying and trying all the most likely candidates for your setup. Only then will you really know the score!

You should also understand that the specifications quoted by manufacturers can be extremely misleading. Frequency ranges and LO frequencies, fine. No problem with basic stuff like that. Noise figures though are a source of much confusion and indeed irritation to those that have any idea about what they mean in real terms. Anything under 0.6dB is good. 0.3dB might actually give you a marginal improvement, but figures lower than than are a con. That's not to say that the LNBs might not be better than those with higher noise figures, but it certainly won't be anything to do with the noise figure itself! Don't be fooled. A 0.1dB LNB doesn't produce any less noise than a 0.2dB LNB in the real world. Unless you live at 0 kelvin, or on Venus.

Top LNBs will start to hurt your pocket. £50 or even £100 will buy you an LNB that will not only get you that elusive transponder, but may have your Mrs. pin you by the throat to the dining room wall with her right hand whilst waving a Barclaycard bill furiously in your face with her left.

Only consider spending this sort of money once you've decided you need to squeeze every last ounce of performance from your setup. You may find that your receiver/tuner is a more cost effective upgrade path than your LNB at this point.

Right, that's enough waffle from me. If you have anything to say about LNBs, their relative merits, or how they have performed for you - let us know here. Try to be as objective as you can, and provide as much supporting information as possible.

STICK

[BGonaSTICK]

I'll start.

LNB's I've owned and loved... with no mention of those that sucked.

MTI Blue-line 0.6dB single - 40mm collar. Good, reliable, though not stunning. Pulled in some Nilesat verticals in the summer on the TD110. Some folks swear by them. Few reports of them breaking down after a couple of years. Have undergone many revisions over time, bringing the noise figure down - on the box at least. Can be picked up cheaply second hand. I paid a quid for mine.

Invacom 0.3dB single - 40mm collar. Maybe the best LNB I've ever owned. Superb performance on weak satellites. Excellent all-round LNB. I've had a couple of these - one bought new for around £25 and one second hand for about £17. I would recommend these to anybody. I've fitted them for other people too. Maybe not such a good idea for very hot climates, as they have an orange plastic film covering the inbuilt feedhorn, and this can deteriorate with age or even split - especially with the heat of the sun focused on it. I'm sure you could repair it quite easily, but once you get a load of crud washed into the guts of the LNB, it's probably scrap.

Invacom 0.3dB twin - 40mm collar. Not going to pretend I made an exhaustive comparison with the single as I never had them at the same time. My feeling is that they were similar in terms of performance, but that the single probably just shaded it on my Triax TD88. Just under £40 new IIRC, it's another great buy. This one stayed on my motorised setup for a couple of years, which is a long time for me! Both outputs provided great results - one side to a Skystar and the other to a Dreambox. No issues or conflicts etc. with either the other output, DiSEqC switches or DiSEqC motors. Has the same plastic film thing. The film on mine dulled over time, but no performance loss. Looks like it may be more brittle, but a gentle clean brought it up OK. Never heard many reports from other folks on this LNB, so would be interested to hear from any other owners.

Inverto 0.3 sliver tech - 40mm collar. Good enough for general use. Not a great performer by any means, but did the job. Advantages are that they're relatively slim (though not as slim as the 'alps' LNBs) and extremely light. Great for multi-LNB setups, such as the use they were put to in my setup - on a multi-LNB arm on the Triax TD110. Good for high-power satellites. Maybe not so good for the weak ones. I paid slightly OTT at £10 a go. Faultless operation on 4-way DiSEqC switch though - which can be an issue with several makes.

Inverto 0.3dB single white tech C120 flange. Very good performer, especially on weaker satellites. Tiny! Very small and light. Frighteningly so. Paid £15 new, but it didn't stay on my Fibostop very long before being replaced. Didn't really have a chance to put it through it's paces.

Inverto 0.3dB twin white tech C120 flange. Disappointed with this LNB, but in it's defence, I wasn't able to mount it completely vertical on the motorised Fibo 90. Some satellites were better than others. It seemed to perform relatively poorly on the very high powered satellites at 28E, 13E 19E etc. but did OK on 7W, 1W, 26E, 4W etc. Just not happy with it. Those satellites which require the skew to be set slightly out anyway may have been severely impacted once you factor in the poor skewing I had to introduce in addition. Would like to give this LNB another try on say a large prime-focus dish to see what it can do. I could possibly be faulty of course.

Invacom 0.3dB quad C120 flange. Still playing with this one. Excellent so far. Really pleased. Still a lot of testing to get through, but by far the best LNB I've had on the Fibostop. Have only tried two of the four outputs, but I opted for the quad instead of the twin as many reports over the years have suggested that the quad generally performs better on fringe satellite reception than either the single or the twin variants. It even makes mention of this fact on the Invacom website. Gives superior (compared to the other C120 LNBs listed here) signal strength and quality readings on all my receivers, and no orange-sweet-wrapper nonsense to worry about with the C120! 

I still have a Fracarro quattro LNB here to install, but I don't have a spare dish at the moment!

You can see a comparative test of the Inverto white tech twin and the Invacom C120 quad here.

Other LNBs I've heard consistently good reports about but never tried include:

Sharp (excellent fringe reception)
Titanium (...and cheap too)
Strong
Triax
Technomate
Syntec (crazy money)

[BGonaSTICK]

I found a link - on another forum - to a very interesting (if slightly heavy) LNB performance testing study undertaken by ERA Technology of Leatherhead, Surrey on behalf of OFCOM.

If you can see through the 'guff', the core testing is actually very interesting, and highly relevant to this thread as it turns out!

Uploaded here for your convenience 

[sid]

Invacom 0.3dB quad C120 flange. Still playing with this one. Excellent so far. Really pleased. Still a lot of testing to get through, but by far the best LNB I've had on the Fibostop. Have only tried two of the four outputs, but I opted for the quad instead of the twin as many reports over the years have suggested that the quad generally performs better on fringe satellite reception than either the single or the twin variants. It even makes mention of this fact on the Invacom website. Gives superior (compared to the other C120 LNBs listed here) signal strength and quality readings on all my receivers, and no orange-sweet-wrapper nonsense to worry about with the C120

I con confirm with this gem,the quad Invacom 0.3dB with feedhorn is very good.This lnb iv used for god knows how many years now,its never let me down on weak signels.Lol iv tryed a few in my time & wasted money on some lnbs.The quad Invacom 0.3dB with feedhorn was well & truly worth its money.