Out with the old...

We're caught in one of those "catch-22" situations at work right now... we have two new CW stations that go on the air September 18th, and need to get the equipment ordered, installed and ready to make that deadline. Problem is, there are still some final legal details to settle in the contract — and until they are completed, we can't get corporate approval to even order the equipment. This should happen sometime next week, which gives us one month to put two stations on the air.

We aren't just sitting on our hands or biting our fingernails (and definitely not both together)... we're cheating. We went ahead and ordered the satellite dish, figuring that we can pull the money out of somewhere if the paperwork doesn't come through on time.

This isn't the only sleight-of-hand going on... some of it is mechanical. We have an old dish that doesn't work very well that we want to replace, but the space isn't large enough for the new dish. We also have another dish about the same size that works quite well, and is in a wide open area. Solution: get a crane to lift the crappy dish off its mounting pipe and set it aside, then lift the decent dish off its pipe and move it to where the crappy dish had been, thus freeing up a pipe for the new dish. That's what we were doing late yesterday afternoon when the crane showed up.

Here's the decommissioned crappy dish, protected by cones. It rained overnight and left a pool of water in the bottom, which our resident garage sparrows enjoyed rather loudly this morning.


The pole was already the right diameter (hooray!) and set in a large amount of concrete, so that unpleasant bit of preparation was already done.

Within an hour I had the crate opened, large parts carried out, instruction posted on the wall, and the mounting base on the pipe.

Colin arrived about then and helped me hoist the grey center drum up onto the mounting base and secure it. It pivots on two large bolts and is secured by a big piece of threaded rod — you can see it hanging down in front.

By lunchtime I had bolted sixteen angle brackets to the drum and bolted the white support braces to the angles. Sometimes things just go too well!

The next step is to put the edge skirts on the braces, and the instructions tell you to use specifically labeled hardware for this step. Problem is, none of the bags of hardware are marked as the directions state. Called the manufacturer: it turns out that they've changed how they pack the hardware, but the directions didn't get revised to match. It also turns out that I used the wrong size bolts to install those braces... so forty-eight 1/4" bolts had to be removed and replaced with 5/16" bolts. Bother.

That freed up the 1/4" hardware I needed to mount the skirts, which went uneventfully, thank you very much. Then on to putting the wedge-shaped reflector petals in place. You might think that this would be the easy part: wrong. The instructions tell you to use tapered alignment pins for this step; a more accurate translation would be "none of the stinking holes will line up, so you need to force things a bit". I tried using several center punches, but the taper just isn't right. Tomorrow morning I'll swing past an industrial machining supply and pick up the proper drift pins; given the FCC's vigorous enforcement action lately, it's best to avoid situations that could evoke inappropriate language.

There is one good thing about this step: the dish is starting to create its own shade. I can already feel the sunburn... good time to go home.