The satellite dish

Now this is one of those ‘chicken or egg’ situations, does your dish determine what satellites you can receive or does the satellite you want to receive determine what size of dish you get? For places which are within the target area of a satellites beam, the signal levels are pretty high so one only requires very small dishes to get enough signal for watching. But as one moves farther along the footprint of the satellite, the signals attenuate so you would need progressively larger dishes to concentrate enough of the signals to get appreciable levels for decoding them. Let’s use nilesat again as an example, for viewers in north Africa, they would only need a 60 or 90cm dish, in Niger, maybe 1.5m, in northern Nigeria, 1.8 and in the southern part of Nigeria, about 2.5 to 3m. But haven said that, let’s say I don’t want only one satellite but like two or three, say like nss7, w3a and nilesat, because their signal levels are only separated by a few degrees (30 to be exact), one would need a 1.8m dish at least to be able to receive all three.
Dishes come either pre-manufactured or locally constructed, usually the smaller sizes are come as prefrabricated dishes and you only find locally constructed dishes in large sizes. Big does not necessarily mean better, it’s all a matter of what you need to get the job