Oct 21 - looking to the heavens

The new satellite dish had come in the night before, so I set about assembling it. There's not a lot to assembly, but it does take time.  Then I had to take down the old dish and install the new ...

For the old dish, I'd setup a vertical mast, from one part of the roof and braced against another.  That makes it easier to set the vertical angle and is more secure than the standard angled mast with the roof mount.  That old mast was 1 3/4" OD pipe but the new dish (85cm vs 80cm) was setup for a 2" OD pipe.  So ... I cut a straight section out of the new angled mast and drilled through the two so that it had a shim.  That wasn't too bad.

I had the approximate compass heading and of course the angle.  47 degrees angle and something like 224 SW gets me in the general direction of the satellite.  One degree off either way means that I miss the satellite by miles.  There's also a skew setting, i.e. the tilted rotation of the dish.  The seller gave me a setting for that -- 128 degrees. 

I have a signal strength meter that is placed inline between the dish and the receiver.  That helps locate the satellite as well, but from past experience, I know that there are many satellites up there and just because it shows a strong signal doesn't mean that it's the correct satellite ...

Long story short, four hours later I had TV.  Up and down, on and off the roof, working with my ankles at an angle and in the heat of the day on the roof wasn't fun.   Eventually I ran an extension cord up to the roof and with the receiver up there and a little 12" TV, I was moving back and forth across the compass heading, changing the vertical angle a degree at a time, trying to find the signal. 

I did some googling, and found a different skew setting, tried that and no luck.  Ugh.  I was ready to give up, but no.  So ... since I was pretty certain that the vertical angle was correct (had double checked that the mast was vertical and checking the angle of the old dish), I started playing with the skew, moving across the compass heading ... voila !  All of a sudden the Knowledge Channel started playing !  That's the best channel to use for satellite finding because a) it's not encoded and b) it has a strong signal.  Playing around some more, I did a little optimization and gave up for the day. 

Whew.  Enough of that !

That was my  BIG DEAL for the day.  Sandy can now watch The National on TV rather than on her ipad ... was this really worth it ?  It would be easy to stream to a laptop and display on the TV ... another year or two and perhaps we can turn off Shaw while we're in the US.  I think that almost everything is stream-able now anyway.

So ... what about the rest of my day; what was left -- I went to the grocery store, did a couple of other minor chores.

Sandy is intensely working out for Kilimanjaro.  She's more likely to make it to the top than me.  I'm saving myself ...

Onward !