The so called Spindle Save Mode will reduce the tracking cycles and will therefore increase the life time of the jack screws and other drive components.

The idea behind this mode is, to used the model parameter from the adaptive tracking and perform only a calculate positioning step between the required step track cycles to reduce the movement of the drive components.

With the ’Spindle save mode parameter we can define how many positioning only cycles will be done between the step track cycles.

Example: Tracking cycle Time = 30sec and Spindle Save Mode = 3, than a full steptrack will perform every (3+1) x 30 sec = 120sec but we will still have 3 positioning cycles between to keep the antenna on the satellite.

Since the quality of the model must be good for this type of operation, there exist an additional parameter ‘Spindle save threshold’ which allow to define a limit. The parameter will look to the peak jitter to qualify the model parameter, a value between 3 to 10% should deliver good results. If the peak jitter above the limit the sat-nms ACU will perform normal steptrack at each cycle.