Time to move again. This time we are advancing north and west to Albuquerque.
Today the wind is not so favorable. It is coming straight out of the west and it is not a gentle breeze. We'll have about three hours of cross wind and 1 hour of dead-on head wind. So much for enjoying tail wind assisted fuel mileage.
Alb. is a necessary stop for us on our way to the Grand Canyon. We have a number of repairs that need to be done and Alb. has the service companies to do it. We have appointments for the water heater, refrigerator and the infuriating satellite dish. We have paid for a week at the Isleta Lakes RV Park but I have my doubts that will be long enough. If anybody has to order parts there is no telling how long it will take.
For the sat. dish we could not get a mobile repair service. We have to pack up, hitch up and tow the trailer about eight miles to the RV repair shop that has a Winegard certified technician. After a restless night of high wind and multiple trains passing by only a few feet away we got up and started going through the routine for moving the rig. We got in as soon as their doors opened and left our home and everything we own in front of a garage whose door was at least two feet too short for our rig to go through. The technician was going to have to do his thing out in the open. Good thing the wind was relatively calm this morning. We pulled out of the driveway trying to figure out what to do for the next six or seven hours. Whether they got it fixed or not, we were coming back to pick up the trailer and take it to the campground for the night.
The air was laden with dirt from the previous night's howling winds. Neither of us was particularly interested in doing something outdoors so we looked up the nearest mall and went to see how much time we could kill window shopping. The nearest mall was almost 30 miles away but we extended that distance by driving by things that looked interesting along the way. Still, it was a long day trying to stay occupied until we were called to come pick up the rig.
The call came but the news was not what I wanted to hear. They were simply going to repeat replacing components that had already been replaced, TWICE. I pushed back, using a favorite idiom; doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is the definition of insane. The technician agreed and gave Winegard another call. They gave him a couple more things to try, one of which was to get under the turret and disconnect/reconnect three plugs that are there. When he got everything buttoned back up I turned on the control box and, BINGO, the sat came to life! While that was pretty encouraging I was not ready to declare victory. Over the next half hour we stowed and deployed the dish three times. It worked flawlessly each time. By this time it was getting late and we hitched up to take the camper to the RV park.
Normally, the sat. dish is one of the last things in a pretty long list of things to hook up when parking. But tonight this is one of the first things I did after leveling the rig. It fired up perfectly and started seeking satellites, then suddenly the display starts flashing "no communication with antenna". Crap, here we go again. But, even though the control box was displaying the fault message I could hear the dish still moving and aligning with the satellites. In just a couple minutes I had a perfect signal and a couple hundred channels on the TV. I called the RV repair shop and caught them just before they went home for the day and gave them the news. Winegard is on central time (we're on mountain time) it is too late to get with them today so they will get on the phone first thing in the morning.
At least we proved that the dish is not dead, it seems to be narrowed down to the connectors under the turret that communicate with the control box. I won't have to wait on them to ship me a fourth satellite dish. Well, maybe. We'll see tomorrow.
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