I was lucky enough to find a big dish (for free, just dismantle and remove from the emigrating owner's garden as the buyers of his house, strangely but fortuitously, were not enamoured by its presence), so an SG Labs 20w PA is more than sufficient for me.
But earlier, when I had a smaller dish, I looked to James (Jim) G8NTG in Kettering for advice. He modifies commercial amps, often sourced from Poland, and mine worked flawlessly. A really helpful gentleman, he gave accurate, practical advice and a choice of options.
Bear in mind most used commercial PA's are modified to work away from their design frequency so there will be power loss, you're much safer with a BIG amp run very very conservatively than a just big enough one run on the cusp of distortion, and needing massive amounts of cooling as most of the input energy goes to waste in heat...IMHO.
PE1RKI (I think that's his call sign) makes a few dedicated QO100 amps, they look good physically and on the band scope, so I am sure he could offer something nice.
I am a race car engineer and race car design starts with the tyres to be used. The whole thing is designed around the tyres you can use on it. Put junk or the wrong tyres on the best race car in the world and the whole car becomes totally blighted by them. I see the aerial in amateur radio as similar to that of tyres in my profession.
A friend getting set up to come on the satellite bought a 1.2 meter dish from some Internet source, brand new, but a quick play with it on my surface table showed it to be a total joke, dimensionally and rigidity wise. My big Andrew dish, after 25 odd years is still true to a couple of millimetres overall and is VERY impressively rigid. Having said that God knows how much a similar new one would cost today.
I have to assume there are dishes and there are
dishes...
I also learnt quickly and painfully that unbranded RF connectors and coaxial cables are a minefield, even at HF, let alone microwaves, so I now bite the bullet and go for branded coax, the stuff cell phone mast companies would use, and branded RF connectors. I have wasted days chasing strange faults and losses caused by junk cables and connectors, and learnt the hard way.
N type and C type and 7/16 are my connector go to, and not the temptingly cheap ones off Ebay.... Telegartner, Rosenberger, Huber & Suhner, that sort of stuff, not cheap, but they work properly.
Looking forward to seeing you on the satellite in due course, good luck
Chris 2E0ILY
) I only used 20W or so at the feed into a 1.2m and had no issues being seen on the Sat. I did only use 1/2 fec but with no loss in quality of my video. 