AFN Satellite Setup Help In Yokosuka

Someone was searching this on the website.. If you know please provide them answers.

I paid a technician after trying to do it myself. It was about $80 well-spent!

I'm trying myself and I'm so close....I've got an 80 in signal strenght but no lock.... There is something not quite right with the setup info housing gave to us...when I called AFN they gave me slightly different coordinates than housing did hmmmm

Hope you succeed. I'd never done one of these even in the States, and I didn't feel like tackling a first effort with badly translated directions. Just the hardware I woulda had to buy made it worthwhile to hire an expert. Good luck!

Doesn't AFN have a website that gives the necessary details?

I had to play around with mine until I got it right. If you're getting a 80 signal strength, you are almost there. The satellite sits pretty low on the horizon over Malaysia. I think it's called NSS6 or NSS7. Skype me at mapple2174 if you are still having trouble.

Isnt there a guide for how to setup the satellite, and pointing things in the right direction?

I had 2 friends try it and they failed their first time. They had to get another friend to go out to the house and help set it up.

I think its harder than people may think.

ThaiGuy,

Do you have the contact info for the person who set it up for you?

Gene

Anyone know of anybody who has an old AFN dish? We just moved off base until we can get on base...probably only be a month or two. I don't want to buy one for that short of time. You can't return them when you are done, so what do people do with them?

We got our dish and decoder for free from Yokosuka Housing Self Help.. I installed it myself but had to rely on phone support from AFN. The coordinates from the self help are wrong.

Anybody have the numbers to the Japanese company off-base that installs these things in Yokosuka?  I've had mine for over 2 years and when I came back from vacation, it's out of alignment.  I have twisted and turned that thing with absolutely no idea of where I need it to be.  My only indication is the dirt mark under it's original position for the last two years.  I'm ready to tear it off the balcony, but I know that will only up my cost.  Thanks.

This is the ONLY company that you will need to call to install the AFN satellite.  After trying to get mine correctly pointed for weeks, these guys LITERALLY had it pointed in LESS than 2 minutes without any tools, instruments whatsoever!

NESCO 046-833-2980

They are in the Yokosuka area.  I think the cost was about $100 bucks, but I'm not sure.  If you use this service, please post your review afterwards. Thanks.


PS - Once correctly pointed, it MIGHT help to mark on the poles its positioning.  However, its my experience that the positioning has to be VERY precise, so even if marked, it may be hard to get it pointed again on your own.

Okay, I have the receiver and the AFN satellite dish and would like to pay to have someone come and hook it up. However, I was told the on-base company that does this has gone out of business. Does anyone know if there's any truth to this?

Does anyone know any other places (English-speaking as I'm going to have to call them) that can come out and install the AFN satellite?

BTW, if you have AFN satellite you can also get Tivo with the correct channel line-up. This doesn't work on base because the bases all realign the channels. It's great being able to program whatever shows you like, and Tivo will automatically grab them off the AFN broadcast.

Thai-Guy - Mind posting the details on how to get Tivo from an off-base AFN satellite set-up? Thank you kindly.

Trust me... It took a good long time to put all the pieces together, but I got it working perfectly last year. Here's the deal:

Read the following website. It's a start, but they don't give the complete answer.
http://support.tivo.com/app/answers.../a_id/1439

The main point is, HD TiVo will NOT work despite any specs you may read about the equipment. You MUST use only Series2 and Series2 DT DVRs. I don't know if these are sold new anymore, but you can at least buy refurbished from Tivo.

Second (very annoying) point: Not only will Tivo NOT ship overseas (as many vendors won't) but they won't bill your monthly fee to a credit card with an FPO address. As far as I know, this is unprecedented among vendors and I ran this as far up the Tivo management chain as I could get. Ultimately, I had to call my bank, change my bank mailing address to my sister's house in CA, set up my Tivo billing, and then I could change back the credit card mailing address to my FPO. I was irate about this, and normally would not deal with such a neanderthal company. But I REALLY wanted my Tivo!!!

And here's the third point, it took me a year to finally figure this out... Tivo tells you to use Zip Code 00020 to get the AFN lineup. They are correct; this will give you the correct list of AFN satellite channels. BUT... it does not factor in that in WESTPAC, several of the channels are time-delayed (the movie channel & a couple of others; that's what the DY stands for in the AFN channel lineup.)

I was going crazy, trying to record Edward Scissorhands, and getting My Little Pony cuz the movie channel times are all wrong. And besides that Tivo displayed time is NOT Japan time, nor is it Eastern Standard; I could never manually set Tivo to get the movies I wanted. It worked good for sports and a few other things, but like 3 channels were messed up.

Solution: There is an Air Reserve Base in California that has the exact same channel line-up AND delayed stations that we have in Japan; I think it's March Air Reserve Base. If you tell the system that's where you are, you will get the perfect Tivo programming we get here in Japan.

There were also some quirks with setting the Tivo remote so that it would also control the antique satellite boxes we have here in Iwakuni. Ours are like 3 generations old. I don't remember the solution, and if you have a newer satellite box this won't be a problem. I had to lie and tell Tivo I'm using a different satellite box than what I actually have, and after weeks of tweaking I finally got Tivo to be able to switch my satellite channel.

Trust me, this process was much more painful than it appears in the condensed version. I hope you can benefit from my sweat. As far as I know, I'm the only one in Japan that has made Tivo work properly with AFN satellite; at least, no one else has fessed up and I participate in many web boards that talk about this subject.