40 Days and 40 Nights Without

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40 days and 40 nights.

No TV

No News

Silence

Nothing to go to sleep in front of - for 40 days and 40 nights.

From 13^th May to 22^nd June - The TV was not operational.

Skippy comes equipped with a TV, Satellite dish and decoding box.

However the manual is in Italian Arabic and Greek. And we did not have time or pressing desire for TV.

But a few days ago I got the time and a little bit of inclination.

So I put the components together. Plugged them in and screwed them together like it showed in the Italian Greek and Arabic diagrams. There is no stand for the dish. So I stuck it on the roof with a suction cup and with a big long cable coming through the hatch.

Pressed a few buttons on that takes the decoder through a ritual that’s like fine tuning a normal TV.

And bingo – it worked.

Picked up about 1000 stations from Hotbird 13E.

WOW.

80%!o(MISSING)f the stations were for a subscription service

19.9%!w(MISSING)ere in Arabic or German

0.01%!w(MISSING)ere in English.

Good start – so I tried a few more satellites and got similar results.

THEN A breeze shook the dish and then I got no signal.

So I twiddled the dish and continued to get no signal.

I found over the course of a few hours that I was dead lucky in how I plonked the dish down in the first instance – to get any reception at all. After that moving the ish itself , or its orientation to the south pole , or its trajectory to the sky even by a few millimetres loses the signal completely.

· So now a few days later we have found

· a way of sort of stabilising the dish base with a box and rocks,

· that the dish base has to be dead level,

· that the dish face has to face dead south, and

· the dish has to have a certain angle to the sky.

So now we have made up some cables to reach through to the outside more conveniently than through the roof and relocated the TV form the bedroom to the dinette and set the wiring up for convenient use.

We can get at least half a dozen news broad casts in English ( eg BBC World, CNBC, Al Jazeera, France 24. Ukraine Today , Bloomberg and Europe News.)

All we need now is a tripod with compass and level so we can set it up more efficiently when we move.

No trouble getting to sleep now.



Last night I nodded of while Barak Obama turned some guys funeral into a political event and proved to us all that he cant sing either.

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