Satellites and the chain of love.. part 2

OK so I'd better begin with the chain of love.

It's a song that was out a couple of years ago by a fella called Clay Walker. Yes he's a country music singer. I'm not going to get into the country music thing here by the way.

Anyway the story goes like this.

A guy is driving home one terrible night. It's snowing like crazy. Up ahead he sees a woman desparately trying to flag down a passing car. He pulls over. It's a nice car, a Mercedes coupé, and the woman driving it is well dressed but desperate for help. She has a flat tyre and doesn't know how to change it. She says she's been flagging cars down for ages on this terrible night but nobody would stop to help.

The guy introduces himself as Joe and says he'll help. He changes the wheel and she asks him how much does she owe him for doing that, she want's to give him something for his trouble as it were. He tells her that she doesn't owe him a penny. He tells her that someone else did him a favour one time when he was stuck. All he asks is that she keeps the "chain of love" going by doing someone else a decent favour.

She gets behind the wheel and some time later comes along a roadside diner. She's hungry so she goes in and gets a bite to eat and a hot drink (I presume).

The waitress is nice and the woman notices that she is heavily pregnant, 8 months along she thinks. She looks tired and must be dead on her feet.

The woman pays and the waitress goes to get her some change from a 100 dollar bill. The woman writes a little note to the waitress, along the lines of "you don't owe me a penny. All I ask is that you keep the chain of love going. Do someone else a favour when you can"

The waitress comes back and is stunned to find the note and to learn that she can pocket the change.

The end of the night comes and she heads home to her partner. As she climbs into bed she whispers to him "everything is going to be alright, Joe".

So that's the idea. Some cultures call this Karma. In other cultures it is said that what goes around comes around (or maybe you've heard it the other way round).

Fortune and fate are cyclical. That's life.

Anyway, back to the satellite dish. Clearly I couldn't leave it clamped to a chair in the front garden with the wire running across the lawn.

So, I unhooked everything and brought it around to the back of the house. I found a wall that looked like it could be a possibility for permanent mounting.

I hooked up the satellite finder again and there wasn't much noise out of it to be honest. The back of the house is not such a good spot because the house is built in what was previously a small quarry. It has a vertical stone wall behind it, and a vertical stone wall to the left. In fact the direction I want to point the dish is a stone wall. The chances of getting it to pick up a signal with this wall in the way would seem to be slim.

I moved it about and amazingly I did get a good solid loud whine from the sat-finder. That was it. It was a GO!

I went to the car and fetched the drill, the power extension cable, the tool box and my big box of screws and fixtures.

When I come to do a job I come prepared and the whole boot of the car was packed with everything I could possibly need.

I got everything out and found some monster-strong outdoor screws and some rawl-plugs. I stuck a big hefty drill bit in the drill and I drilled that wall.

5 minutes later the bracket was on the wall. Now to put the dish up.

With the sat-finder attached I slipped the dish onto the mounting pole on the wall bracket and moved it about until I got a good whine from the satellite finder.

I got out the spanners and tightened it up.

I went back inside to check all was OK.

Disaster. No signal. Nothing.

I went back out and loosened the dish and moved it again. The whine dropped and then picked up again as I moved it to the left. Then there was a noticeable shriek as I seemed to hit a point of alignment with the satellite.

I tightened it up a little again and went inside.

Scooby Doo was loud and clear!

I returned to the dish, tightened everything up and did one more check inside. All OK.

I packed up all the tools and put them back in the car. They are still there today but today it is lashing rain. There was no way I could have done this in the rain so I am so relieved it worked.

I went back into the house, pulled up a chair and had a quick look at what was coming in on the receiver.

I counted 482 TV channels and hundreds of radio channels. There was a ton of stuff. BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 4, QVC, Movie channels, religious channels, shopping channels, Indian TV, Turkish TV, Middle Eastern TV, even Al Jazeera. Amazing. Granted many of the channels from the 482 were scrambled but they were lots of the specialist ones such as sports channels and so forth.

Last night I went up to the house with my two buys to teach my mother how to use it and how to locate the channels. In typical fashion she wrote everything down on a bit of paper she tore out of a diary. She has always done that.

So, she's pretty happy and I am too.

Now I just need to keep my youngest brother away from the house. He'd easily sit there all night flicking through all these channels.

Now that I have installed the thing I got to thinking about other people who have bought one of these systems. I got to thinking how if someone I know buys one I'd definitely offer to come around and help get the thing installed. I figure if I do that I can save someone loads of time and can help them get it all installed in no time.

It would be a favour. My way of starting some kind of satellite dish installation chain of love, or something like that.

So if you have one of these kits and want some help getting it working, let me know. I think I can help.

Hopefully now you can see the meaning in the title of this long double-posting.