I want my Florida back! I had to wear sweats today Last night it turned cold. Wind blowing, rain drops, coldness. There is some kind of wrong mixed in there.

It could be because I wasted an entire day yesterday. Maybe the Weather Gads were paying me back for such an unproductive day. I had every intention of wasting the day away by doing some work, working on a couple of my other sites that are in development, and maybe having a beer or two. It didn't happen. Instead, I had to rescue my DirecTV dish that blew over.

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Maybe it wasn't the best idea to only use my collapsible water jug to weight the dish down. Saturday night, the wind started kicking up, but I didn't even think about the dish because we are settled in amongst a lot of greenery. The coach wasn't getting blown much, but the dish wasn't close to the coach - it was out in the open so I could catch the satellites.

I noticed the casualty Sunday morning when I walked outside in the morning. My brand new 3-LNB DirecTV dish was laying on its back. That would have been fine if we were at the equator, but being where we area, the dish was not catching too many signals.

I set it up and drove some spikes through the legs to keep it more stable. It didn't look like the reflector was bent, so I confirmed my settings and got my meter out. BAM! Hit 110 right away (or so I thought). The next 7 hours was spent aiming, cussing, working with Ang watching the signal on the TV and calling me on the radio to give me signal strengths. Even a couple of Coronas didn't help.

I took the dish all apart and checked to make sure the reflector wasn't bent. Cleaned all of my connectors. Pointed and re-pointed. All resulted in a signal on 110, an intermittent signal on 119, and nada on 101.

I have only had the 3-LNB dish for a short time, and the first time I pointed it took a little longer than the normal 5-10 minutes the single-LNB took. When set up here at Ft. Desoto, it took a bit, but was able to get all three satellites. This time, however, proved to really try my nerves.

I learned some interesting things from reading about possible issues. Found that the main bracket is used for the azimuth setting on this type of dish. I use to use the LNB arm to point, but the LNB arm gets skewed on this style. I also learned the relative positions of 101 and 119 to 110, and found that the LNB can lock on a satellite, but it doesn't know which one it is. You can get a strong signal, but it may be locked on the wrong bird.

The best way I found to determine I was actually locked on 110 was to look at how many transponders were responding on the signal display through the receiver. If three transponders were showing, the signal is on satellite 110. 101 and 119 have more transponders that show.

I used the forums at directv.com to answer a lot of questions, but it was the "Satellite TV and Radio on the Road" at the Escapees Forum that helped me out a lot.

I also found a great tool at Dishpointer.com that really helped locate the satellites. There were also links to other helpful sites that gave me lots of info.

After struggling all that time, I still wasn't able to lock in on all three satellites. Unfortunately, we had the season finale of Dexter AND Survivor coming up, so I "cheated".

I never like to admit defeat, but we had shows coming on! I found out that in my situation, I really needed only one satellite - 101. I told my receiver that I was on a single LNB dish, pointed to 101, and we had TV.

The not so funny post script to that was that I figured out several things that I was not doing right, and ended up hitting all three birds with that final point. Whatever. Just needed one But, next time, I know that if the pointing doesn't work out after the first hour or so, just use the one satellite. It works fine.

Lessons learned. All in the name of quality television.

--kev