No No NO, I'm talking about an electrically steerable beam.
Some satellites use these to configue "spot" beams to different parts of the world after the satellites are launched. The antenna is made up of lots of dipole antennas, and a specific antenna pattern is formed by changing the feed line characteristics to each dipole antenna. This should be feasable to do for a home antenna, especially since there would be a very limited number of antenna patterns required, pattern A points at Echostar I, pattern B points at Echostar III, etc... There is no physical movement of the antenna, the set top box would tell the antenna to switch between the satellites depending on the channel that the user wanted to view.
If someone on the thread knows how commercially practical this is, please enlighten me. It may be that the antenna form factor would not be desirable for a home setup, but I don't know. IF worse comes to worse, we could have a motorized dish that moves from positon A to position B quickly to cover both satellite positions.
What bothers me is that Echostar has not done this work up front already. I would have designed the system so that there was an output jack on the set top to control a dish positioner. As far as I know,the set tops dont have an output to do this. Would not be difficult. The set top would listen to a control channel that would tell it which channels are on which satellite and when the user selected a channel the control signal would drive the positioner to move the antenna if necessary.
At least the stock is going up, if I get rich maybe I'll quite my job and design the hardware myself.
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