Warm and sunny to start the day, with temperatures climbing up into the high teens (C). A few more setup chores were left to do today. The barbecue needed to be assembled and connected up to the gas supply, that was the easy one. Next came the satellite dish, ideally we’d have a system similar to the big mobile homes; these have a half dome on the roof which houses a motorised satellite antenna. All you have to do is power on the beast, it will get it’s position from its built in GPS, calculate where the satellite should be and point the antenna at it, all in about 30 seconds. The downside is that they cost around $2500.
The poor mans way of doing the same is to get you position (GPS or Google Maps will do), then go to a web site and calculate the azimuth, elevation and skew that the antenna should be pointed in. Next dig out the tripod and anchor it to the ground so that the centre pole is as vertical as possible then mount the satellite dish on the tripod. Next task is to point the antenna according to the calculations you made earlier and then connect the antenna to the receiver. At this stage (in theory) you should have a perfect picture on the TV…. wrong, invariably there will be nothing on the TV. Now its time to tune the satellite receiver to the setup page and “wiggle” the antenna in all three directions until the receivers shows you have some kind of signal. Once there is a small signal “minute wiggles” are made until the signal is at its peak. On a good day about 15 minutes are needed to complete this task, on a bad day this can stretch into hours. Never mind, it takes many hours (or a lottery win) before there is justification for the automatic gizmo. All that to say we now have TV, which is an improvement over last year!
Lyn decide to head out on her own to do some shopping, leaving me a couple of hours to unpack my new toy, a radio control quad-copter. In effect this is a helicopter with 4 rotors, this should make it a lot more stable and easier to fly than the helicopter I had previously. One day I’ll manage to control one of these things. So far I have managed to set it up with my transmitter, but I am having an issue getting the engines to work, at least there is less chance of crashing it in that state.
It was warm enough to sit outside this afternoon for coffee, and Lyn stayed out reading for a while. Most of the puddles from yesterday have now dried up. Tonight it is forecast to drop to around freezing, so the thermostat has been set up and the furnace tested to keep us alive over night.
It was great to have a day with no driving!