The satellite

Which is basically what this whole thing is about. There one basic truth in this fta business, and that is you can only receive broadcast from a satellite whose footprint happens to fall over where you reside. Now the extent to which you can receive the beam depends on how much coverage the satellite has over your area. Basically, broadcasters aim at a particular region. For example, Hitv broadcasts to Nigeria, while Gtv focuses on Ghana, and Nilesat broadcasts to the middle east and north Africa. Now it is impossible for the satellites transmission to be restricted to only a particular country or area, so it goes without saying that viewers in Nigeria will receive Gtv with some slight drop in signal level as you go away from the intended broadcast region. That is what is behind the fact that people in the northern part of Nigeria can receive nilesat’s broadcast with a little less effort than those in the southern part of Nigeria. I do expect that it would be next to impossible for people in south Africa or Jamaica to receive nilesat because of signal attenuation.
So with this in mind, if you want to set up a dish to view fta, you need to check up what satellites broadcast towards the area in which you reside. Luckily for us, the folks at lyngsat.com have taken the pains to map out all available satellites, with their respective channel list and a map that shows expected signal levels and the necessary dish size one needs to catch them. Now because there are lots of satellites whose broadcasts can be received in west Africa, most people tend to try and receive about two or more signals on one dish, this will be touched on later.
Now another information you will get from lyngsat is the azimuth of the satellite in question. This refers to the relationship of the satellites beam to the magnetic north (or in reality, the magnetic south), and this is given in terms of degrees east or west (from the magnetic south pole), for example, nilesat is on 7ºw (that is 7 º in a westerly direction from your south pole), nss7 on 22 ºw, eutelsat w3a on 7 ºE, among others. This is necessary to help you orient a dish. There are also other parameters including the elevation which is relationship of the beam to horizontal on a vertical axis (does that make sense? It sorta means how much the dish needs to be tilted up or down), and finally the skew, this refers to rotation of the lnb around its axis. I could try explaining all of this but I’m not going to do a good enough job without diagrams so I guess I’ll have to refer you guys to dishpointer.com for more information.