Sweetpea's pathetic excuses for not fixing the MR2

Who wants to learn about satellite dishes then? No? Sorry, ‘cos that’s the topic of the day. You could just skip to the summary at the end.


Mostly we watch the TV off satellite rather than the aerial. Just because that’s the way we roll here at Sweetpea towers.
And, because I am dead posh, I don’t watch ITV much. I can’t stand the endless crappy dramas and reality TV. I much prefer to watch the crappy dramas and reality TV on the BBC ‘cos, like I mentioned, I is dead posh. Innit.
Now I come to say that I think TV can be disappointing. Endless crappy dramas and reality TV… I’ve even heard of something called a ’soap’ where all the characters hate each other and say “you’re a slaaaaaag” all the time. Why would anybody watch that?
Anyway, Mrs Sweetpea’s mum is living with us and she’s not as posh as me so she’s watches crappy dramas and reality TV on ITV. Actually at the moment she’s watching a crappy Christmas film on Channel 5, which, speaking as a posh person, must be some sort of council TV or something?

The point of all this is that ITV was breaking up from time to time and the technical department at Sweetpea towers (me) was getting complaints.
A quick check of the receiver showed that the signal level had tanked and the quality was right down. Later in the evening it fell to the point that level and quality weren’t even showing on the bar graph. How on earth it was producing a picture like that is a mystery.

So I popped out yesterday to realign the dish in the hope I could get some signal back. The dish isn’t a standard Sky jobbie that you can point vaguely upwards and it’ll probably get something. It’s an old scrap one I pinched from work years ago to do some testing at home. It’s a bit bigger than standard. The up side is that it gets more signal than a standard dish so it doesn’t drop out when the atmospherics get a bit messy. The down side is that it has a narrower acceptance angle so it doesn’t take a massive knock to misalign it. Anyhoooo, the dish hadn’t moved. That’s very bad news because it means I know what the actual fault is.

To hide the dish on the back of the garage I let the ivy grow round it. Every now and again I cut the ivy back with the hedge trimmer. Well, at some point in the distant past I’d clipped the cable with the hedge trimmer.





Oops. I guess it’s finally failed. Bumhats.
Here’s mr dishy mid way through rewiring the cable.





I said it was old. Works ok though.
I know what you are saying… If the cable had failed I’d have lost all the channels to the receiver not just some of them. We’ll, that’s the other thing that’s different about this dish.

Normally you get a choice if four signals down each cable. High Band - Vertical, High Band - Horizontal, Low Band - Vertical, and Low Band - Horizontal. The receiver sends instructions back up the cable to tell the LNB (the grey bit on the front of the dish) which of the four it wants.
This is a commercial LNB and the 4 cables carry the 4 signals - no switching. That means that something else needs to interpret the instructions from the receiver and send it the correct signal. That’s done by this switch thing in the garage.





The advantage of doing it this way is that you can stack loads of these switches and run dozens or even hundreds of receivers off one dish. I don’t need that but it’s just how this particular LNB works.
In a standard domestic LNB the switch is built into the LNB itself.
That does mean that when I damaged the cable I only lost signal on some channels rather than all of them. It also explains the coloured cable ties because the order of the cables between the LNB and the switch is critical. I think it was high band, vertical that suffered the worst damage although I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. (In much the same way as I wasn’t paying a lot of attention when I was using the hedge trimmer all those months ago.)

Anyway… Replaced the two cables that I’d had an accident with. Had the F connector fall apart on a third cable so that got replaced too.





I’ve grown to really hate F connectors. Horrible things.

And now Mrs Sweetpea’s mum can watch trashy rubbish on ITV again.
Why did I fix that!? She’ll never bloody leave. 

So how badly damaged was that cable?





Yeah. It’s toast.
To be honest I’ve never understood radio frequency systems. The signal gets 22,000 miles from the satellite to the dish and then can’t jump the 1mm gap where I cut the cable with the hedge trimmer? How can that be?


Summary at the end…
Replaced cable. TV working again. Mother in law happy. Never going to leave. 


James

Very similar setup with a quad LNB to ones I worked with offshore, last rig I was one had 20+ sky boxes and 20+ Freeview boxes. Due to the distance involved between dish (which tracked the satellite as the rig moved) and the the accommodation block, the LNB signals were multiplexed, converted and sent down a fibre optic cable, this was reversed at the other end and fed into the receivers, the output from the receivers was then multiplexed and distributed out on a single coax to the TV's.

This is rather interesting - well to me anyway.

In a Bear Grylls type survival tip, if you find yourself in an urban jungle in the UK with no compass, if you ever want to know which way is south so you can find which way is north, just look at all the sky dishes. They all point south, presumably to the equator or a somewhere in the northern hemisphere anywya.

Similar here but no one uses satellites, so look to see which side of the house people's solar panels are on.

Majority should be facing northish so they get the most sun.

If you are wondering why I’ve not been talking to you, it’s largely because I’ve not done much. However… Today…

Remember that fence thing round the decking?





Yep, that’s the one.
Remember I hadn’t cut the newel posts to length? Remember that Mrs Sweetpea was talking about putting lights on the top but I didn’t want them? And, besides, we couldn’t find any that we liked.

Then Mrs Sweetpea found a photo of a post top shape that she liked. I liked it too. And it meant a total of zero lights to try and fit. First job was to knock up a prototype so I could see what it looked like and to get the shape right.





There you go.
It took a couple of goes to get the angle of the top but eventually it looked right. Lovely. Happy with that. What’s not to like?


Well there is one thing not to like.

When I was simply thinking of cutting the post tops off I was concerned about getting the cut square and tidy. I reckoned I could do it by hand with panel saw if I was careful.
But that ^^^ - no feckin’ hope!
Easy enough on the table saw in the garage but totally impossible with the posts in place. So that means the railings have to come off, the decking around the posts comes up and the posts are removed. Having just nicely got the bloody thing together the last thing I wanted to do is take it all apart again.

Oh well.





Apart, it jolly well came.

I’d marked the top of the railings on the posts before I’d taken them off. Then I measured 10cm up and cut the posts to length. All the measurements are then worked from the top down.

I needed an accurate diagram with measurements first. So using the prototype as a guide I produced a bit of cardboard with pencil marks on it.





That done I just set the fence on the table saw according to my diagram, set the blade height, did a triple check that I’d got everything square and pushed it over the blade.
Once round all 6 posts then you move the fence to the next measurement and do it again.





Now a challenge. Cutting the point on the top.





Setting the blade angle was the easy bit.
When I made the prototype I used a stop on the saw and butted the bottom of the prototype post against it. Then, each time I rotated the post round for the next cut, so long as the bottom was against the stop all the cuts would be in the same place. But that doesn’t help me now. Firstly the real posts are much longer and the bottoms are nowhere near where the stop can get to, and secondly the posts are all different lengths anyway.

What I need is for the angle cuts to be referenced to the slots I’d just cut. Hmmm. Hadn’t thought of that and I don’t know how to do it. What a conundrum. Only one thing for it. Go sit on the loo and think about it for a while.


Eventually I had an idea and built a ‘thing’. (I built the ‘thing’ in the garage, not while sitting on the loo. Mrs Sweetpea objects to having bits of steel piled up in the toilet. I keep telling her how productive I could be but the argument falls on deaf ears.)





The edge of the angle drops into the slot I’d cut and it nicely clamps to the existing stop on the saw.
With this, not only will all 4 cuts on the top of this post be in the same place but all 6 posts will be identical. God, sometimes I’m so clever I surprise myself!





Seems to be working.
So here are 6 posts ready to go back into the decking.





The green tint is the stuff that, apparently, stops the cut end grain from rotting. The colour also gives a bit of definition to the slots so, by happy accident, I quite like it. Chances are it’ll soak in and lose a lot of its colour. That’s what seems to have happened elsewhere.


I’ve actually fitted the posts again (not the railings yet) but it was dark by the time I’d finished so no photos.
When I come to fit the railings again I’ll have to deal with the fact that half the screws broke off. Really. Hmmph.

James

Yeah you're quite right. And if the post tops go soggy they'll get chopped off and a cap put on.
That said I doubt if there'll be a problem. The posts are really tight grained and the table saw doesn't fuzz them up. (Even though the blade is blunt to the point of being totally borked.)
We've also got some old wooden posts in the garden. Some have caps on, some don't. All the caps are rotten yet the posts without caps are fine. The bottom of all of them have rotted off though!

I think the short answer is that wood is a bit hit and miss but I'm optimistic that, even without caps, it'll be quite a few years before I need to worry about it again.
I suppose the other thing I've learned is that if you want wood to last in the garden, make it out of brick!

James

A few years ago this thread started, just in the new year, with me fixing the Christmas lights.

It’s new year again and…





It’s almost as if it happens every year. An annual event.
Happy new year by the way.
I can’t fix all the lights because half of them are still dangling from the house and I need to get the ladders out. Any of you living in the bottom right hand corner of the country will know it hasn’t stopped raining in, well, it feels like decades. I think the weather will improve later in the week so I can look forward to fixing more lights.




Remember the clock I pinched from work to try and get it running? Well, apart from a bit of testing to see how well it locked to the mains it was done.





Nearly. Once it goes high on the wall in the workshop there’ll be no way to adjust it. I needed buttons to set the time.
Remember that the computer that runs it (an Arduino) doesn’t know where the hands are pointing so the best I can do is fast forward it and stop it.





There you go. Buttons. And lights.
The one with the yellow light tells the clock if you want to go backwards or forwards. For backwards it just stops for a while, for forwards it runs at double speed.
The other five buttons move it a set amount of time. The left one is one hour (for summertime changes), the right one is one second. The others are varying amounts of time. The coolest thing is that it actually seems to work!
I’m going to run it on the table for a while to see how it keeps time.

When it goes back to work I need to tidy it up and get it in a box.
I say “when” but who knows how long that’ll be. I’m getting very used to working from home. Won’t want to go back to commuting.

James

Not exactly sure what that means - looked it up and i still don’t understand- however they are designed to be single use brittle screws. The brittleness is so that installers can break off protruding screws with a sideways swipe of the hammer rather then be slowed down. They are particularly useful for drywall applications - if you have ever demolished a drywall wall it is so easy to just go along and break them. Likewise i expect that the manufacturer doesn’t expect anyone to draw out the screws from drywalls or decks.

I like them posts with the slits in them. Almost look like the slits should have lights coming from them!

Happy New Year by the way!