So, being the sort of obsessive satellite hobbyist one finds on these forums, I couldn't leave well enough alone. As I posted in another thread, I had a relatively functional motorized Primestar dish setup on Saturday, insisted on "tweaking it a little" on Sunday, and completely hosed everything up. Well, around 10:30pm tonight, I decide I can't leave it alone. I know what I have to do - move the dish just a few degrees east, maybe tweak the elevation slightly, and I should be dead on. Well, that was not to be.
I figured I could take my receiver outside and use a portable, battery-powered TV to view the signal quality meter. The TV's only got a 1.7" screen, so the numbers and text were illegible, but I could make it out enough to choose a satellite and a transponder, to get the quality meter. No problem, right? Not exactly.
First, my extension cord is too short. Fine, I go get another. No problem. Now I've got the receiver, the tiny TV, the remote, my 1/2" wrench, my head-mounted flashlight, and I'm good to go! I start hooking everything up and go to connect the coax to the motor when I see something moving.
It's a spider. OK, I think, no big deal - spiders build webs on things all the time. But what's that red mark on its abdomen... oh hell.
It's a brown widow - much more shy and less inclined to bite people than its better-known cousin, the black widow, but at least one expert claims it's more venomous.
Well, spiders don't especially scare me - even ones that can kill me - but its presence certainly makes me think twice about my plans to tinker with the dish. So what do I decide to do?
1. Take pictures. In addition to being a satellite geek, I'm also a wannabe nature photographer.
2. Mess with the dish anyway, but be very careful where I put my hands.
So I took a few pictures, and two of them actually came out reasonably well (which is surprising, given that my camera does poorly in low light, so I was holding a flashlight and trying to take flash pictures with at the same time). I have attached them for your viewing pleasure (my apologies in advance to any arachnophobes who stumble into this thread). I did attempt to align the dish, too, but it was just too hard to do without putting my hand in places where I couldn't be sure there weren't more spiders. Also, I somehow got one of the nuts on my STAB HH120 motor mount cross-threaded, and ended up breaking the sort-of-U bolt trying to get it off. I ended up admitting defeat for the night.
I did end up spraying some bug spray up under the dish mounting hardware, where the shy brown widow had run to when I showed up. I didn't really want to kill it, but dammit-all, it's that or never touch my dish again. Which did you expect me to choose? Heh...
And so concludes my tale. The moral of this story: watch where you're putting your hands, 'cause you never know how this hobby is going to try to kill you.
I figured I could take my receiver outside and use a portable, battery-powered TV to view the signal quality meter. The TV's only got a 1.7" screen, so the numbers and text were illegible, but I could make it out enough to choose a satellite and a transponder, to get the quality meter. No problem, right? Not exactly.
First, my extension cord is too short. Fine, I go get another. No problem. Now I've got the receiver, the tiny TV, the remote, my 1/2" wrench, my head-mounted flashlight, and I'm good to go! I start hooking everything up and go to connect the coax to the motor when I see something moving.
It's a spider. OK, I think, no big deal - spiders build webs on things all the time. But what's that red mark on its abdomen... oh hell.
It's a brown widow - much more shy and less inclined to bite people than its better-known cousin, the black widow, but at least one expert claims it's more venomous.
Well, spiders don't especially scare me - even ones that can kill me - but its presence certainly makes me think twice about my plans to tinker with the dish. So what do I decide to do?
1. Take pictures. In addition to being a satellite geek, I'm also a wannabe nature photographer.
2. Mess with the dish anyway, but be very careful where I put my hands.
So I took a few pictures, and two of them actually came out reasonably well (which is surprising, given that my camera does poorly in low light, so I was holding a flashlight and trying to take flash pictures with at the same time). I have attached them for your viewing pleasure (my apologies in advance to any arachnophobes who stumble into this thread). I did attempt to align the dish, too, but it was just too hard to do without putting my hand in places where I couldn't be sure there weren't more spiders. Also, I somehow got one of the nuts on my STAB HH120 motor mount cross-threaded, and ended up breaking the sort-of-U bolt trying to get it off. I ended up admitting defeat for the night.
I did end up spraying some bug spray up under the dish mounting hardware, where the shy brown widow had run to when I showed up. I didn't really want to kill it, but dammit-all, it's that or never touch my dish again. Which did you expect me to choose? Heh...
And so concludes my tale. The moral of this story: watch where you're putting your hands, 'cause you never know how this hobby is going to try to kill you.
