TV signals continued....

Looks like a fixed-mount, open-faced dish is going to be the choice for us.  Winegard makes an antenna that will automatically raise itself and locate the satellites.  It has an LNB setup that will see three satellites simultaneously.

With this dish, DirecTV has a receiver/DVR that can record 5 shows at a time, deliver a feed to a second TV, PIP and split screen two shows or a show on one half and a computer display on the other half.  Cool!  And all in high definition.  DirecTV calls this receiver the "Genie", it is going to be pretty slick if it works as good as it sounds.

I have been getting set up with the folks at New Horizons (manufacturer of my rig) for a summer visit to do some warranty work.  I talked to the service manager about doing this antenna upgrade too.  He not only said: "no problem" but offered to get me a better price on the antenna than anything I could do.  He sent me an email later, and sure enough he quoted me a price better than anything I could find on-line.

It is such a pleasure doing business with people that take care of their customers.  New Horizons has done right by me.  They were great to work with during the build of my rig.  I was a bit obsessive about designing everything but they were ever-patient and worked through all my wants while offering some expert guidance.

Almost one year to the day our rig was built we will be back to the factory and let the good people at New Horizons work on a couple of piddly little warranty issues and have them do some more significant upgrades.  I look forward to them continuing our good experience with them.

Growing up in the Texas Panhandle your perception of what is old and historic are skewed rather uniquely.  Oh sure, as kids you read the history books and did your daily lessons about Columbus, the Magna Carta, and the guys that dreamed the dream and forged the ideas of having a country where self-reliance was your ticket to prosperity.  But all that was a bit disconnected for someone that never ventured farther than Oklahoma to visit family during summer vacation.  In my little West Texas town the first permanent structure, a brick house, was not built until around 1930.  That was the standard for 'old' for as far as you could see in any direction on the compass.  Keep in mind that is pretty far, for in these parts of the high plains you had to do little more than stand on the second strand of a barbed-wire fence and see the curve of the earth.  Ancient history that was real to us, something we could see and touch, was limited to some ruins of dwellings built out of mud, known as Adobe Walls.

A trading post established in 1843, Adobe Walls can't really be called ancient by the standard definition which uses the Roman Empire as an example of what is ancient.  But it was our ancient, our most distant connection to the past.  Imagine my amazement later when, as an adult my work took me through all parts of Europe, Asia and Israel.  Everywhere I looked there was ancient.  Heck, most of those guys I worked with in Europe did not even call something 'old' unless it had been around more than 400 years.  They thought nothing more of living and working in these old buildings than I did about a sub-division built to accommodate the coming baby-boom of post-WWII America.

Following work, I drug up my family and moved to the Deep South.  Now while many people might think of someone from Texas as Southern, it just isn't so.  There was a familiarity to the culture of North Georgia, but it was definitely not Texas or Oklahoma.  And this place was way more 'historic' than anything we were accustomed to.

So where am I going with this?  You've indulged me so far but there needed to be a little perspective to go with the rest of what I write today.

An adjustment for Cyndee and I living in the metropolis of Atlanta was more than a cultural shift, it was also dealing with traffic.  When we moved to Georgia in the late 80's Atlanta had a metro area population of about 2 million.  Today that number is about 5 million.  What is important to understand about this is that the road system that the Atlanta of the 2000's was built on, was on the roads of the 80's and the roads of the 80's are the same roads of the 1800's.  Now if these were based on some kind of planning or forethought, then maybe it would be okay.  But no, pre and post-Civil War Atlanta had little more than game trails that turned into footpaths that turned into wagon roads.  Everything meanders through the woods to get you to one of a gagillion places to cross water.  Modernization of the road system for this part of the country meant throwing some asphalt on those game trails and call it a highway.  These people have never met a square intersection, full-width lane or a shoulder.  Nope, the road ENDS at the white stripe on the edge.  Nothing but a ditch lined with trees going one way and an embankment with rocks jutting out going the other way.  Dropping a tire off the edge, even at low speed, can make for a bad day.

Watching people drive around here is like watching bumper cars at the carnival.  We've spent the last 20+ years duckin'-n-dodgin' trying not to become a casualty of the culture.  Well, it caught up with me this week.  While making a parts run to retrieve a thermostat for an errant refrigerator I was on one of those game trails that pass for a highway.  And as usual, making lunges forward for a couple thousand feet and then stop to wait on traffic to clear coming from the other way so somebody in front of me could make a left turn.  With no shoulders and lanes barely wide enough for one car, there was no going around the right of someone and keep traffic moving.  Everybody has to stop.

But in today's age of distracted driving not everybody keeps up with what is going on in front of them and,,, bing-bang-boom; you have yourself a multi-car wreck.  That was me this week.  I could not dodge this one.  I was sitting dead-still behind someone making a left.  Had already been thirty seconds and there was no break in the traffic coming from the other way.  With my F-550 truck (aka Big Gulp) I was contemplating weather I would drag high-center if I went to the ditch to go around on the right.  But right in the middle of me sizing up the situation I feel a jolt from behind.

A quick look in the mirror and I barely see the roof-line of some imported something-or-another cross-over.  And very close behind that was the originator of the jolt; a chromed-up F-150 driven by what is now a dazed-looking teenager.  On contemplation though, he may always look dazed.  All I know is that cross-over import is accordion'd between two pickups.  The front end mostly under my class A hitch and the back end wearing the imprint of a blue oval.

Okay, time to go to the ditch and get out of the road before this little party gets any bigger.  Luckily I did have clearance, not so for the days-old Mazda (the lady said she just bought it this week) or the F-150.  The fire department showed up and started blocking the lanes and let one side go at time while the cops investigated the accident.

The Mazda was wrinkled up from end to end but drivable.  The F-150 had heavy front end damage and left on a tow truck.  The kid driving the truck left in an ambulance after complaining of chest pain associated with the seat belt keeping his head out of the windshield.

 

Have you ever heard the story about one guy walks up to another guy who's face looked like hamburger and the first guy says; "Oh, your face, what happened?"  And the second guy says: "If you think this looks bad, you ought to see the other guys hands!"  If that Mazda is the second guy's face, then my truck is the other guy's hands.  At first glance you can't tell anything has happened to Big Gulp, you have to look close to see the bent power port for the trailer brakes and the slight deflection of the bumper.  That class A hitch took the brunt of the impact and did a number on the Mazda while protecting the truck.  But as slight as it appears, it looks like it is going to be a thousand dollar repair based on the estimates I have so far.

 



Getting out of this metroplex lifestyle can't come soon enough.  It gets harder every day not to jump the gun on the planned retirement date.  But Cyndee and I both have commitments to fill, we are going to see it through.

Its time to get serious about how to receive television signals.  After more than six months of getting our television entertainment the old fashioned way via a cable connection to Comcast, we know that there is no way to continue with this setup once we start moving around the country.

There are many ways to get TV reception but most of them are pretty limited, some like the old days,  only getting three channels at best.  To get a full choice of "cable" channels you have to go with a satellite dish and get service from either DirectTV or Dish Network.  The Dish guys do make an extra effort in that they have an RV division.  They tailor the service to mobile users by having a separate customer service, no contracts and the ability to turn the service off and on in a month-by-month fashion repeatedly.  The con is that there are no national network stations, so no "local" programming such as news and weather or the prime time shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.  DirecTV has all the stations but they require contracts, usually 2-yr minimum.

There are lots of combinations to sort out.  You have to buy a specific antenna depending on the kind of service you want such as standard definition or high definition, number of channels you want to watch (for instance you may need to be able to "see" 5 satellites at a time if you want HD and more than about 20 channels).  Using one of the portable dome satellites that you can easily set out in the open and get clear of trees or whatever don't really have good signal quality capabilities and are way more susceptible to signal loss because of wind and rain than the larger, open-faced dishes.  The open-faced dishes with automatic satellite discovery (not in-motion) are fixed mount.  They have to be bolted down to something that is pretty solid.  This means the top of the camper which also means that there will be loss of signal when parked in the shade.

It has taken a lot of investigation to get this far and the folks over at the Escapees discussion forum have been a huge help.  Those folks have been practicing what I'm a greenhorn at for a long time.  Based on all their good guidance I am leaning towards the fixed-mount, open-faced dish with service from DirectTV.  But I am still not clear on all the trade-offs.  Miss Cyndee has suggested I put together a comparison spreadsheet.  Good idea, I think I just might do that.