Setting up sat dish

Dutch_12078 wrote:

lanerd wrote:

Dutch_12078 wrote:

We've stayed in many RV parks where a roof mounted dish could not be used due to tree cover. Even with our portable dish we've sometimes been limited to only one or two sats though a small hole in the trees. The Dish version of the Trav'ler is a western arc only automatic dish, even further limiting the aiming options.

We have found that by calling ahead to our next stop on the morning of the day we will arrive, we can always secure a spot that has a southern exposure for the sat dish. I think only once in the past few years was this not possible (due to a holiday weekend and the part was just about full). On that day, we just watched some of our recorded programs.

Ron

You must not have stayed in some of the parks we've been in where there's no good southern exposures on any site, just a few holes through the branches where careful positioning of a portable dish gets you one or two satellites on one arc or the other. The two photos below from our current site show where the Dish western arc and DTV birds are, followed by the hole where my dish could see the Dish eastern arc sats. What doesn't show, is the 100' of coax from our tripod mounted dish back to the motorhome.

When we call ahead to ask for southern exposure, they will normally tell us if they don't have any. If that's the case, we call another rv park. Now if you're camping (really camping), a portable antenna is the only way to go, but we rarely (if ever due to our size) camp in campgrounds in the forest or woods. We did that a lot in our younger years with our pop-up and TT, but then we didn't have much use for TV when camping.

Ron