{"id":3893,"date":"2012-11-11T20:08:05","date_gmt":"2012-11-11T20:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=3893"},"modified":"2012-11-11T20:37:33","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T20:37:33","slug":"by-jove-i-think-ive-got-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/by-jove-i-think-ive-got-it\/","title":{"rendered":"By jove, I think I’ve got it!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Look, this satellite stuff is all new to me. When I bought my installation kit on Ebay months and months ago I also acquired a second-hand ‘satellite signal detector’. To be honest, it was more in hope than expectation because when you receive this kind of stuff that you’ve found on Ebay, half of the time it doesn’t work. And not only had this been left in my garage in the UK for many months, it had also then been dumped in a box with a load of other stuff and subjected to a trek across half of Europe. So I hardly expected to get much out of it.<\/p>\n

It looks like a bit of 1930’s laboratory kit, but can’t be of course, because satellites haven’t been around that long. And the rather amusing Chinese-English in the accompanying 4-page, ie a single sheet of paper with a fold down the middle :-), ‘user manual’ also gave the lie to that. But it said quite emphatically that all you had to do was roughly line up your dish with your chosen satellite, if necessary using the compass provided (that’s a laugh for a start as it’s only 1″ in diameter!), connect the signal detector, waggle the dish from side to side and up and down and tweak the sensitivity knob on the unit until you got your signal. Sounded easy enough, even though I’d be stuck up a ladder while doing it and holding the signal detector in one hand, its battery pack in the other and waggling the dish with another. Eh?<\/p>\n

Amazingly enough, guided by the green line on Google Earth as shown in my previous posting, it didn’t take me very long to get a signal and after adjusting the sensitivity knob and waggling the dish in the manner prescribed by my Chinese advisers, I tightened the nuts on the dish bracket and descended the ladder with a look of quiet confidence on my face which, sadly, nobody could see as I was alone. Except for Toddie that is, and he by this time was thinking more about his lunch-to-come than anything to do with satellites or satellite dishes. And I must admit, I was a bit suspicious of how easy it had all been – too easy if you get my drift. So after Toddie and I had grabbed something to eat to keep us going, I went across to the corner of my neighbour’s out-house over which the green line was supposed to pass on its 38000 kilometre journey to the Astra satellite and looked back. My face fell. It was obvious that the dish had got a signal from somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t from Astra and if I had connected my box up to it, who knows what TV stations I might have picked up! The dish was directed much too far south and I had obviously been far too over-confident in my new-found satellite detecting skills \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

I came back indoors and fired up my computer to see if I could get some kind of clue to what was going on. Surely there couldn’t be that many satellites in that direction… Er, yes there are. The web site had listed them in clockwise order going from east to west and if I wasn’t mistaken, it appeared that I had managed to lock onto Eutelsat Hot Bird 13A. This, according to the blurb I unearthed by doing a Google search, carries more than 500 free-to-air TV stations but hardly any of them in English. So, back to the drawing board, or more correctly the satellite dish. If I’d managed to get my dish so closely aligned in the beginning, using the corner of my neighbour’s out-house, how come I’d not managed to pick up Astra when I did my dish-waggling? The answer was in the sensitivity knob. The lesson in all this is believe your web site, it’s there to help you and to ‘Trust Your Green Line!’ After I’d slackened all the nuts again, re-aligned my dish, connected my signal detector and turned my sensitivity knob, BINGO, there was my signal. Remember, we’re dealing with digital stuff here, none of your old-fashioned analogue nonsense, so you either have it or you don’t. And I had it. I then began to carefully reduce my signal detector’s sensitivity in the manner instructed by my Chinese experts who had crafted this superb piece of precision kit, while simultaneously waggling my dish to pick it up again until the kit and I had attained our limits. Then I knew that the job had been well and truly done \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

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Obviously, I won’t know that that’s the case until (a) I connect my mum’s old Freesat box to it and (b) buy a TV and hook that up to the box, but I’m quietly confident. You know what they say, if it looks right, it probably is, and I reckon I’ve got it on the button.<\/p>\n

The rest of the afternoon was a bit of an anti-climax in comparison to the technical dramas I had triumphed over earlier on. Toddie more or less lost interest and kept reminding me that it was getting close to his dinner time (it wasn’t, but he does that whenever he’s bored with proceedings) while I ran satellite cable from my newly-illuminated ‘grenier’ along under the eaves of the house to the dish. The highlight of the afternoon was when I heard the unmistakable sound of a Rotax 503 two-stroke engine approaching my house from far off at low level and Wim flew over giving me a cheery wave from the cockpit of his single-seat AX3. It was a perfect day to be flying – bright, sunny and almost windless – and he reminded me of what I’m missing while the X-Air is parked covered up in my back garden and I am busying myself with all these other jobs. They have to be done, but I’d rather be flying… \ud83d\ude15<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Look, this satellite stuff is all new to me. When I bought my installation kit on Ebay months and months ago I also acquired a second-hand ‘satellite signal detector’. To be honest, it was more in hope than expectation because when you receive this kind of stuff that you’ve found on Ebay, half of the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3893"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3904,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions\/3904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}