Sorry if I'm late to the thread, but I used to subscribe to Star Choice from the "lower provinces" for about 5 years.

I don't know the degree to which it has changed, but I do know some things about the satellites they were using.

When you're doing aiming and setup, please don't assume that because it's a service that transmits TV to residential customers, that it is similar in technology to
the DBS (direct broadcast satellite) services with which you may be familiar. Star Choice/Shaw Direct is a DTH (direct-to-home) service, not a DBS service. At least it wasn't when I had it.

DBS satellites like D!SH and DirecTV use very high-power transponders (I like to call them "flamethrowers") in order to be able to be received on the 18" pizza pan. They almost all universally use circular polarization in North America, though I know when I was a D!SH subscriber they rolled out a couple of LNBFs that had both circular and linear LNBs inside. If I had to hazard a guess, it was because they were trying to cobble together transponder space to support
a set of channels that wouldn't fit on the available built-for-purpose circular DBS transponders, and had to backfill with either other available linear transponders on the same satellite, or from those on closely neighboring satellites.

DTH services may be power-optimized or may just use available transponders on existing satellites with a goal of using a receive-only dish that works, but isn't too large.
As a result, you'll see a range of dish sizes for DTH services, but in general, they'll generally be larger than the pizza pans.
PrimeStar was another DTH offering and their elliptical dish looked rather similar to the Star Choice/Shaw Direct dish.

In the case of the initial Star Choice service, they were using transponders on the Anik satellites that were decently powered, but nowhere near the output of say, the TPs on the Nimiq birds that Bell is using for their D!SH clone service.
When I was a subscriber, ALL of the transponders in use for Star Choice/Shaw Direct (they rebranded when I was a subscriber), were linear, and they were using DigiCipher-II, just like home C-band TVRO customers, and customers in the U.S. that were subscribed (whether they knew it or not) to what used to be called HITS, or the Headend In The Sky service. Some of you may remember that their music channels were run for years in ZK (zero key) modes, a.k.a. in the clear. There was even a modestly-sized Motorola receiver, the DSR-410, that was pretty good for receiving those, and nowhere near the size of the original Star Choice HD receivers.