Tuesday, October 04, 2005

11:24 AM Tuesday October 4, 2005

Satellite TV update:

We found “Roger” the owner of East Coast Satellite just north of Salisbury in the yellow pages. Phil called him, explained our dilemma and made an appointment to meet him at his shop. When we arrived, he had a dish wired, ready to go and after some adjustments to suit our needs we asked him to come to the motorhome to help us get set up. After being delayed the first time, the next day he came by and after about three hours we had satellite reception on both the front and back TVs. Roger reworked all the cables (much to Phil’s dismay because he’d just recently memorized the original configuration) and did his best to answer our many questions. We paid him ($226) for the dish, cables and his time. We had purchased the tripod earlier in Bangor.

That night we had a major (sustained winds at 15-25 mph and gusts up to 50 mph) wind/rain storm blow through the Salisbury area and it knocked down the dish (the tie-down wasn’t tight enough) and after Phil set it back up, no matter what he did we couldn’t get a signal. Upset but relieved this had happened now instead of two weeks down the road, we called Roger and when he came by, he couldn’t get a signal either. Perplexed he finally remembered an atypical anomaly that is hardly ever a factor in home-based satellite systems. Sometimes, if the receiver loses the connection to the satellite abruptly (in permanent applications this would be very unusual), it gets what Roger called a “brain freeze”. Only by shutting it off, counting to ten and turning it back on can you unlock the “freeze”. We tried it and immediately we were again receiving the signal. Success!

Monday, the 3rd of October was a travel day and we moved south to a tiny RV park in Sandwich, MA. This was Phil’s first time to set up the dish on his own and in about 15 minutes, we had a good strong signal so we are happy campers. Unfortunately, we are not receiving a very good antenna signal (it’s coming from Providence, RI) so our local channels are not very good but since we’ll be moving again in a few days, we can live with it. It’s a small inconvenience when compared with the freedom to move around in our home on wheels and see these beautiful places in our country.

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