After long last, here’s a post that’s actually about FTA stuff. Although I am drinking from an ivi.tv coffee mug as I write it. (You can buy yours from CafePress.)

I used to have a dish dedicated to all of the great over-the-air programming of then-Galaxy 10R, so I could switch over to one of those channels in a snap. A couple of months after the old Equity stations winked off, I moved that dish to pick up all the PBS channels on AMC 21.

As of yesterday, this stationary dish had a small Tracker 0.2 dB LNB. Although I’ve never had a truly bad LNB, I keep swapping them out as they improve.

The latest new LNB that I wanted to try was an even smaller Spitfire Elite 0.1 dB from DMS International, via FridgeFTA. What bugs me these days about AMC 21 is Montana PBS, which comes in for me just enough to be detected, but without enough signal strength to watch. Was this new LNB sensitive enough to make a difference?

After a quick swap, I re-peaked the dish while keeping an eye on the signal quality. On the transponder I used for testing, the old Tracker’s quality flickered from 67 to 70. With the Spitfire, it stayed steady at 70, with occasional blips of 71.

Montana PBS still isn’t working for me, and this quality improvement is pretty marginal. But if you’re just now buying your equipment, or if you want to wring every last drop of quality from your dish, the Spitfire is a good choice.