Techno Techo Techno
It's been a bit of a techno new year for the Green Man.
The Dish
Over the Xmas hols I finally got round to putting up the second satellite dish. I figured out after much squinting along a compass that I could get a clear line of site to Hotbird at 13 deg E by putting the dish on the granny flat at the side of the house and pointing it over the kitchen roof. The other advantage of this position is that I only needed a step ladder to put up the dish. (The Green Man is not happy with heights)
I guestimated the elevation and azimuth and then connected up the sat finder.
It was spot on.
The bandwidth is strong in this one....
Anyone who has pointed a large satellite dish will know how absolutely jammy this is. A parabolic dish is like a cutdown reflecting telescope. ComSats are 22,400 miles away in geosynchronous orbit and are, for all intents and purposes, point sources. If you could see in the microwave spectrum a ComSat would look exactly like a star. Anyone who has used a reasonably powerful telescope will have noticed how even tiny movements can move it off target. It's exactly the same for a satellite dish and gets progressively worse as the dish size goes up.
The two dishes are linked by a DiSEqC switch on the outside wall of the house to my trusty old Technomatic box and I can now get the Astra FreeSat service at 28 deg E and HotBird at 13 deg E. It only took me two years to do despite having all the bits, but my defence is that I have been insanely busy.
As to the new content I can now receive on 13 deg E, well obviously that was secondary to the fun of putting the thing up! Most of the content is foreign language since the satellite is meant for continental European viewers. I often channel hop with the sound down late at night when I'm too tired to read and I'm waiting for sleepy mode to kick in.
There are vast amounts of Shopping Channel dross, naff little local stations jabbering away in Italian, and endless religious channels with stern/earnest/improbably bearded people in strange clothing telling other people what to think. Highlights (if you can call them that) are BBC World Service, Bloomberg and the endlessly amusing Fashion TV. The latter two are available in Sky in the UK but you have to pay. Paying for Fashion TV is bizarre. Only in rip-off Britain would you have to pay for a glorified trade promotion channel.
Oh. I almost forgot the pr0n. Since I have a Free To Air system I can't receive the encrypted pay per view porn channels. I still get the freebee soft pr0n. Mostly these consist of obviously bored women in their underwear wiggling improbably augmented breasts while they wait for premium rate phonecalls and texts. Often the bandwidth has been turned down so low to save money that any significant movement dissolves the images into a morass of macropixellation as the codec process struggles to squash the image changes through the feeble data rate. One wonders why the owners bother with these channels when mostly free pr0n is so ubiquitous on the internet.
Gin isn't a Sin
The Green Lady was washing up after a marmalade making session when she managed to drop our rather cute little electronic thermometer into the dish water. It promptly died. Argghhh!
The Green Man whipped out the battery and promptly immersed the device in a bath of Gin, shook it to remove as much of the Gin as possible from the innards and left if to dry on a radiator. A few hours later and a new battery and all is well again. Hurrah!
This works because spirit alcohol has been distilled to remove the majority of the water and thus has a high affinity for water. It literally washes water away from the components. Alcohol is an organic solvent that evaporates far more easily than water in confined spaces and doesn't generally support corrosion as it does so.
Gin was used because the Green Man is not the kind of person to stock cheap supermarket Vodka in his drinks cabinet.
Snake Oil
We've been struggling since we moved in to make our cottage warmer. It's a 19th century solid stone walled structure and there's only so much you can do without changing the appearance and charm of the place. We don't particularly care for wallpaper and external insulation is extremely expensive and so we are trying Thermilate. It's basically tiny, tiny, hollow ceramic spheres that you mix into your favourite paint. It looks like gray dust, mixes in to paint quite easily,and the overall effect when dry looks and feels a little like how I imagine sharkskin to be like, but you can paint over with a normal top coat to get back a smoother, washable surface if required.
We were a bit worried this might be Snake Oil (as our American cousins put it) but it does seem to have an effect. One coat isn't enough. Two is ok. Three is good. The Green Lady has left an uncoated patch in the living room to allow for before and after comparisions. It's a bit like the old houses where they leave a small window in the wall so you can see the wattle and daub construction lurking behind the modern plaster.
Only time will tell if it makes a real difference but you can feel a measurable difference when you put your hand on the wall of a three coat area and we've noticed that the condensation puddles that used to collect on the tiles in front of the upstairs bathroom window have suddenly gone away. So it's clearly raising the dew point of any surface that it's painted on.
The Dish
Over the Xmas hols I finally got round to putting up the second satellite dish. I figured out after much squinting along a compass that I could get a clear line of site to Hotbird at 13 deg E by putting the dish on the granny flat at the side of the house and pointing it over the kitchen roof. The other advantage of this position is that I only needed a step ladder to put up the dish. (The Green Man is not happy with heights)
I guestimated the elevation and azimuth and then connected up the sat finder.
It was spot on.
The bandwidth is strong in this one....
Anyone who has pointed a large satellite dish will know how absolutely jammy this is. A parabolic dish is like a cutdown reflecting telescope. ComSats are 22,400 miles away in geosynchronous orbit and are, for all intents and purposes, point sources. If you could see in the microwave spectrum a ComSat would look exactly like a star. Anyone who has used a reasonably powerful telescope will have noticed how even tiny movements can move it off target. It's exactly the same for a satellite dish and gets progressively worse as the dish size goes up.
The two dishes are linked by a DiSEqC switch on the outside wall of the house to my trusty old Technomatic box and I can now get the Astra FreeSat service at 28 deg E and HotBird at 13 deg E. It only took me two years to do despite having all the bits, but my defence is that I have been insanely busy.
As to the new content I can now receive on 13 deg E, well obviously that was secondary to the fun of putting the thing up! Most of the content is foreign language since the satellite is meant for continental European viewers. I often channel hop with the sound down late at night when I'm too tired to read and I'm waiting for sleepy mode to kick in.
There are vast amounts of Shopping Channel dross, naff little local stations jabbering away in Italian, and endless religious channels with stern/earnest/improbably bearded people in strange clothing telling other people what to think. Highlights (if you can call them that) are BBC World Service, Bloomberg and the endlessly amusing Fashion TV. The latter two are available in Sky in the UK but you have to pay. Paying for Fashion TV is bizarre. Only in rip-off Britain would you have to pay for a glorified trade promotion channel.
Oh. I almost forgot the pr0n. Since I have a Free To Air system I can't receive the encrypted pay per view porn channels. I still get the freebee soft pr0n. Mostly these consist of obviously bored women in their underwear wiggling improbably augmented breasts while they wait for premium rate phonecalls and texts. Often the bandwidth has been turned down so low to save money that any significant movement dissolves the images into a morass of macropixellation as the codec process struggles to squash the image changes through the feeble data rate. One wonders why the owners bother with these channels when mostly free pr0n is so ubiquitous on the internet.
Gin isn't a Sin
The Green Lady was washing up after a marmalade making session when she managed to drop our rather cute little electronic thermometer into the dish water. It promptly died. Argghhh!
The Green Man whipped out the battery and promptly immersed the device in a bath of Gin, shook it to remove as much of the Gin as possible from the innards and left if to dry on a radiator. A few hours later and a new battery and all is well again. Hurrah!
This works because spirit alcohol has been distilled to remove the majority of the water and thus has a high affinity for water. It literally washes water away from the components. Alcohol is an organic solvent that evaporates far more easily than water in confined spaces and doesn't generally support corrosion as it does so.
Gin was used because the Green Man is not the kind of person to stock cheap supermarket Vodka in his drinks cabinet.
Snake Oil
We've been struggling since we moved in to make our cottage warmer. It's a 19th century solid stone walled structure and there's only so much you can do without changing the appearance and charm of the place. We don't particularly care for wallpaper and external insulation is extremely expensive and so we are trying Thermilate. It's basically tiny, tiny, hollow ceramic spheres that you mix into your favourite paint. It looks like gray dust, mixes in to paint quite easily,and the overall effect when dry looks and feels a little like how I imagine sharkskin to be like, but you can paint over with a normal top coat to get back a smoother, washable surface if required.
We were a bit worried this might be Snake Oil (as our American cousins put it) but it does seem to have an effect. One coat isn't enough. Two is ok. Three is good. The Green Lady has left an uncoated patch in the living room to allow for before and after comparisions. It's a bit like the old houses where they leave a small window in the wall so you can see the wattle and daub construction lurking behind the modern plaster.
Only time will tell if it makes a real difference but you can feel a measurable difference when you put your hand on the wall of a three coat area and we've noticed that the condensation puddles that used to collect on the tiles in front of the upstairs bathroom window have suddenly gone away. So it's clearly raising the dew point of any surface that it's painted on.