Intelsat 20 68.5°E dish alignment

The principal sub-Saharan African position, carrying the DStv platform across the continent.

Point a dish at Intelsat 20 68.5°E now →

Where to aim from your city

Azimuth is the compass bearing measured clockwise from true north, elevation is the angle above the horizon, and skew is the LNB rotation in degrees clockwise seen from behind the dish. Values are for Intelsat 20 68.5°E at 68.5°E.

City	Azimuth	Elevation	LNB skew
Johannesburg	62.6°	36.0°	-52.8°
Cape Town	65.0°	24.2°	-48.8°
Nairobi	87.9°	53.1°	-87.5°
Lagos	93.0°	16.4°	+82.8°
Accra	92.2°	12.7°	+84.0°
Kampala	90.5°	48.3°	+89.4°
Dar es Salaam	78.1°	55.0°	-76.3°
Lusaka	72.6°	40.9°	-66.9°
Harare	68.2°	42.7°	-62.1°
Luanda	83.9°	26.5°	-79.3°
Addis Ababa	105.3°	53.9°	+72.2°
Windhoek	73.0°	27.4°	-62.0°

Not on the list? The pointing tool works these out for your exact coordinates and then guides the dish onto them with your phone's compass and tilt sensors.

Setting the dish

Set the skew on the ground, before the dish goes up — rotating the LNB afterwards is awkward and easy to get wrong.
Set the elevation against the mounting tube. Remember that an offset dish points roughly 20 to 25 degrees higher than its face is tilted, so the tube angle is smaller than the elevation in the table.
Sweep the azimuth slowly, a couple of degrees at a time, pausing a few seconds for the receiver to lock.

Take the compass bearing a few metres away from the dish. The reflector and mount deflect a phone's magnetometer by ten to twenty degrees at close range, while the tilt sensor is unaffected.

Dish size and elevation

From the northern edge of this footprint the satellite sits under 15° above the horizon, so a clear line of sight matters more than dish size: trees, roofs and terrain bite hardest at low elevations.