I had to step away from this nightmare for a few days or so.
I've shifted my sleeping schedule to normal hours for a few weeks, up during the day, sleep at night.
When I threw my hands up in the air some days ago, I don't remember, maybe a week ago, I had reached the snapping point.
I had previously found both Me and this channels and for one night, they both came in at the same time and the signal was not perfect but pretty acceptable for casual watching. OK, fine. So the next day I went out to try and tweak it in a little more, a little better. And I lost BOTH channels then and couldn't get them back!
That was it. I said to h*ll with it and threw all the tools, meter, everything into a box and decided I would stick to RTV and Larry the Cable Guy for a few weeks.
Later that night, as I was going through the channels, meTV was back. Oh joy.
The next morning, GONE. Later through the day it would begin to try and come back. By sunset it was coming in just fine. But this tv was gone again. It hasn't come back since.
Whatever.....
I can't watch me tv in the morning but that doesn't matter because I'm sleeping through the shows that I would like to be watching. In the afternoon, sometimes, I can get Hawaii 5.0, some days it comes in fine, some days, like today, not at all. But by sunset, stuff comes in just fine, and this is without me touching anything. No adjusting the dish, no touching the gbox, nothing. For some reason I can't get that satellite in the daylight hours.
And the shows that I like on this tv, start at 3am but I'm sleeping through those too so it's not bothering me that much.
During my time off I worked on my other hobbies, my roses and my wind chimes. I make wind chimes for myself, just because I like to. So I focused on that and to heck with the bleepin satellites!
Then yesterday I decided to get it in gear and start working on the BIG dish. So I worked on a very large wind chime project and then when I reached a stopping point I set that aside and worked a few hours on the big dish.
I had to loosen all the bolts up so I could get all the rest of the bolts into the ribs, they weren't lining up before. The problem though is that the thing is so darn big. So I built a sling out of a tow rope, tied it to a tree and used it to let me lean waaaaaaaaay over so I could reach the bolts in the center of the dish without leaning on the dish and mashing it up.
I got all the bolts in then flipped it over. THAT was fun.. NOT.
Several of the screen panels had been popped out by my dog when she was chasing squirrels and cats so I had to sit down and fix all those. That's not too hard to do if you are patient and take your time.
Then the next thing I did was attempt to replace the brim/ridge/edge cap thing that goes around the edge and holds the screens in place and also appears to strengthen the whole thing.
NONE of the holes would line up. I spent a good hour trying to fit the four pieces to the edge and line the hole up and I’ll be darned if I can figure out how they went.
I finally gave up on that and got my new drill and a little drill bit and drilled new holes and screwed the bleepin things back. I thought I was so smart......
Then I realized that I hadn’t tightened the bolts that hold the panels together and there were gaps between them! Gaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!! So I had to unscrew the edge things, tighten the bolts all up then put the edge things back on, drill new holes and put the screws in again.
I finally got all four edge things screwed into place and only lost one screw into the grass. The stupid things are stainless steel so magnets won’t pick them up! Why can’t the make stainless steel that magnets will pick up? That’s dumb!
So after that, I called it a day and went inside. And as usual, me TV was working, I could watch 9:30pm on...
Today, I went back out and finished my giant wind chime project (my neighbors just love me!) and after that I decided to see what I could do next on the BIG dish. So I propped it up on a saw horse (believe it or not, the whole thing weighs almost nothing, in comparison to a bag of dog food which is my lifting limit), it’s just clumsy to handle with the high winds we are having. I can tell that this thing really does catch the wind like a sail despite the mesh holes in it.
So I put the center piece in that you bolt the lnb arm into. THAT was very, very difficult to do because the bolts would spin around when I would try to tighten them from underneath.
After a good hour of getting nowhere with that I dug through the tools my dad gave me and I found a pair of pliers that locks on stuff. So I tightened the pliers and locked them on the bolts on the top then went under the thing and tightened them with a little wrench and socket. I had to crawl out and move the pliers for each bolt then go back under, over and over for all eight bolts.
That was no fun at all.
But now the dish feels SOLID and STRONG. There’s no flimsy anything to it. It’s almost twice as big as the little 6 foot dish but it feels 100 times stronger and more solid.
I feel confident that this is going to be the answer to my misery.
So after I got done with that I placed the ring on the back of it. Two of the clamp tracks rusted away. My dad is going to come over and put some new clamps on it then temporarily weld them so he can take the whole thing home and weld them properly with his big welding machine. He has a little one to bring over here for sticking the clamps on but it’s not good enough to do big welding. Fine with me.
Dad has a lot of stuff going on this week so there’s no chance he’ll be able to do the big welding on it until next week. We also still have to cut down the pole as it’s way too tall. I’m hoping that if we cut the pole down to 4 feet tall that it will be high enough to keep the thing off the ground. I don’t know, I have no idea how to guess at it without it being all put together.
I also need to bury the wire from the switch box where it comes out of the ground and over to new pole. That’s not too hard to do.
I’m going to have to get either my dad or my friend’s BF to help me put the beast on the pole next week..
As to the little dish, I am absolutely and totally convinced that it is warped because of my mishandling it and that it will never work properly. I’ll find another satellite that has something worthwhile on it and leave it sitting there. The big dish is going on the gbox and it will be the one I will watch me and this tv on. And of course I will be able to move it around too if I need. I think that I will also be able to get RTV on it as well. Maybe one day I will buy another 6‘ dish to replace the one I bent up and ruined and then it might work right. But this one, is just too messed up. I don’t have the patiences or experience to fix this thing so for now it’s going to be parked on another satellite.
One of my problems is I’m a red head and that means I’m a bit of a hot head. I get frustrated easily and quickly with things. This is not conducive to success. Tomorrow I am going to the Buddhist temple to spend a few hours hanging out with a friend there and the head monk, I need to get back on the path with my meditation, it really helps but I haven’t been working on it for the past few months. I’m going to spend some time in the gardens there tomorrow, check out the roses, the lotuses and snag some bamboo to plant. A few hours away from here in a peaceful setting will go a long way to calming my anger with this very, very frustrating project.
One way or the other, I’ll get my channels.
I can’t believe I’m even messing with this stuff! Surely I have lost my mind!
I need a new, less stressful hobby. Like, um, watching TV!