If nothing else, living in a small, isolated, rural village, has certainly forced me to become self-reliant.
In a normal place, when you buy a satellite TV system, an expert installer comes out to your house and sets it all up for you free of charge. Living where I do, it is something I can only dream about. McBride is so far away from any big city (135 miles, or 217 km), that no expert will ever comes to set or repair anything for us. There is no local set-up person, so like everything else, it fell upon my un-expert shoulders to set up my satelliteTV system. Luckily, with a lot of trial and error, I was able to get the dish and satellite TV going.
For many years, my satellite TV dish was on my house, but our house is located rather close to the neighbor’s wooded property, and eventually his trees grew so tall, that they began blocking out my satellite signal so I had to find another location for the dish.
This was a lot harder than I expected. It seemed that in every location I checked, the satellite was either blocked by trees, or was too far from our house, which would cause signal loss from a long cable.
I finally settled on putting the dish in my barn yard, where I could get a signal, and was only 60 meters away. I anchored the satellite dish in the ground, then began the task of aiming the dish to the exact location in the sky where it could pick up the satellite signal.
That meant wheeling our big TV and satellite receiver machine out to the barnyard in the wheel barrow. I also had to get power to them, so I had to use a few of extension cords which were attached to an electrical outlet on the house for power. I needed to attach the receiver to the dish with a cable and attach the receiver to the television with another cable.
Luckily, since I had to deal with this sort of thing several times before, I had several left over satellite cables stored away in my shop, and I was organized enough to have all of the cables stored in one spot. I went to that spot to grab the cables I needed. I found one of the right length for the dish/receiver connection, but all the other cables were either too long or too short.
I finally decided to go with a big coil of cable which was much longer than it needed, but I chose it and I took it out to the dish. I connected the dish to the receiver with the short cable, then grabbed an end of the cable in the coil and screwed it into the receiver. I grabbed the end sticking out of the coil, and plugged that into the TV set.
My task then was to slowly move the satellite dish up and down and back and forth until I got the signal from the satellite. I would know when I had the satellite, because the low drone sound coming out of the TV would suddenly become higher in pitch. The higher the pitch the stronger the signal.
Because I had done this several times before, I knew roughly what part of the sky the satellite was in, and figured that it should only take me about 15 minutes to find it.
I stood behind the dish and slowly moved it up and down, then I moved the dish a little more to the south and did the up and down movement again. I repeated this over and over, and got nothing. I started the procedure again, repeating the movements. Still I got nothing. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t find a signal. Surely the satellite was still up there. I checked all my connections to make sure they were all tightly screwed in.
Everything seemed right, so I tried slowly moving the dish again, and again. I moved the dish back and forth first, then doing the up and down to see if that made any difference. I rotated the dish to varying positions over and over again. I got no signal.
I had spent 1 hour and 45 minutes moving the dish around, and didn’t pick up even the faintest signal. I was starting to get extremely frustrated and wished I lived in a place where someone who knew what they were doing, could be called to come out and figure out what was wrong.
I eventually decided to unplug all the cables and then start all over. In doing that I discovered that the long cable coil that I had used, was actually two separate cables, coiled together. I had screwed in the end of cable “A” into the satellite receiver, and the end of cable “B” into the TV, so there really wasn’t a connection between the receiver and the TV. I felt like a fool.
Once I had the two ends of the same cable screwed in, I quickly found the satellite and got a strong satellite signal. I tightened the screws to hold the dish into that position and gathered up all my equipment. With all my built up frustration slowly beginning to wain, I wheeled my TV and receiver back into the house, hooked it all back up in the living room, and was finally able to sit down in my chair to enjoy my satellite TV once again.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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