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Well, this post is long overdue. I had hoped to have everything I wanted to do done by now but life dictated otherwise. We were all sick in September and again in October and then again in November. That really slowed things down but I still made some decent progress since the weather was so nice. Here are a few things I managed to do over the last few months when I wasn't sick.

First, I moved our motorized 90cm ku dish forward from it's original location, which was slightly behind our motorized 8' bud. Not having to 'see over' the bud allowed me to shorten the pole, making it much less susceptible to winds.

Next, I dug up and moved an old pole that was already on our property and used it to mount a second 8' mesh which I got from a neighbor last year. Used a tow strap and truck tire (on rim) hooked to my pickup to pull it out of the ground. I used S hooks, turnbuckles, antenna wire and rebar driven into the ground to plumb the pole in it's new location. The dish ring and mount had a lot of rust on them after standing unused for many years. For the ring and outside of the mount I used a wire brush in my hand drill to get down to bare metal. I rethreaded the elevation adjustment. The inside of the mount was covered with rust and crud and would not slip over the pole. In order to scrape everything loose and get it 'sized' to go over the pole I had to improvise. I worked on this slowly over several days using a 2" boring head set that I adapted to fit in my drill press. Then I used a cylinder hone to grind everything smooth. It was a bit unconventional but it got the job done fairly easily. After cleaning everything it painted up nicely. I really lucked out with aiming. Using dishpointer.com, I set the elevation and skew and just eyeballed the azimuth. When I connected the Birdog I immediately got signal! A little fine tuning and it was good to go. The mesh still needs fixed but surprisingly it works as is for now, getting most of the stuff on 99w. My daughter was a big help with this one. Here are some pics, plus there is a zipped video attached below of the bore and hone in action:



Then, I set a pole and installed a Fortec Star 80cm stationary ku (currently set for 97w but may change in the future). I used the Maverick MK1 that I won back in August (Thanks KE4EST!) for this dish. It has been performing very well. Here are a few pics:



For now the stationary 8' mesh (99W) and 80 cm ku (97W) just serve our bedroom but I want to set up multiswitches to share them (and any other dishes I install in the future) throughout the house. We did very little hand digging for the dish installs or moving the old pole. Although it's actually for planting bulbs or small trees, I used one of these

in my drill to loosen the dirt around the old pole and to dig the holes for the new poles. Once the dirt was loosened with this, it was quick work to remove it with a shovel and it made the job much easier. CAUTION though - use a variable speed drill on the slowest speed necessary to do the job and do not lock it to the on position. If you hit a root or rock, the drill needs to stop fast. If you lock it on you will just about tear your hand off.

Finally, at the end of November I used my tiller to dig a trench, about 100', between the dishes and our house.



I planned to run new coax in early December while the weather was still pretty nice but I didn't get it done. There were several birthdays plus we needed to get ready for Christmas. That is as far as I got...



In January both my wife's dad (Alzheimer's) and my uncle (COPD, cancer) took a turn for the worse. My father-in-law fought hard over a period of several days but passed away January 8th, just before my wife's birthday. Eight days later my uncle passed away. That, along with the east coast snow storm and a broken snowblower has me not really in the mood to work on anything else right now. Other than participating in the forum, I'm gonna hold off on other FTA projects until Spring and spend some extra time inside with my family.