This blog is sort of about Dish…. But let me back up.
We are in our final week+ before hitting the road again. We’ve been in this park for several months. When we came here (again), we picked a spot that was too shaded and under a pine tree. After a few days, a nice spot on top of the hill opened – that also had a nice deck someone had left. We moved up there without much thought of the kind of trees we were going to be under. We would have shade about half the day and they weren’t pine. That was as much as we thought about it.
Well a week later, during quite a Central Illinois thunderstorm, a 2 inch branch fell – but I think it slowed its fall by hitting other branches on the way down. I searched carefully, but found no damage.
But, several times a day !!THUD!! or poc, poc, poc, poc. One end of the RV was under a 40 foot tall walnut tree and the other end an equally tall oak. The squirrels would go up in the oak tree and eat acorns and dump the bits onto the roof and the walnuts, I presume, would fall on their own, several times a day and of course, without warning. But, the site was nice so we stayed.
Then, one night/early morning: 3:30 am – nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock! What? It sounded like knuckles wrapping on the front door as fast and as frantically as someone could knock. We jumped out of bed, turned on outside lights – and there was no one.
Ok, we’ve heard of people doing that for kicks, but not in this RV park. Yet, we are in the middle of town, so who knows. The next day we put out our motion detector lights, and the next night – nothing.
Third night: at 3:40 nock, nock, nock, nock, space, nock, nock, nock, nock! We jumped up – saw no one and none of our motion lights had been set off. What? So, we lay in bed till our normal time to get up thinking about all the possibilities – too loud for a squirrel, wrong time of day for a bird. Why would a person be targeting us? No idea made any sense. I couldn’t think of anything in the RV that would pseudo-randomly start making that noise ever, let alone at that time of night.
It turned out that I had planned to install an Easy Start in the front air conditioner and it came to the top of my to-do list that afternoon. I grabbed my tools, went up to the roof and found this:
Apparently, a walnut falling 30 feet broke right through the dish dome. It was sitting in the bottom. It didn’t affect how the dish worked – we had been using it every day without a problem. But the antenna must have chosen to do some sort of diagnostic calisthenics in the middle of the night and the walnut was certainly preventing full rotation of the dish.
Well, the Easy Start install went without hitch and I had my wife toss me up some clear packing tape. I didn’t want to take a chance that duct tape would have something that might reduce the signal quality and I hoped it would only be temporary. I pulled the cover off and taped the cracks and hole from the inside, then also taped everything from the outside. Re-installed the cover, tested the air conditioner and sat down to find a new cover. Turns out the domes are available from Dish – $80 and immediate shipping. I can only hope it’s built just a little stronger. I am thinking though about some sort of protective cover in case of hail – like some thick bubble wrap shaped into a dome…. My solar panels, by the way haven’t been hurt by any of it.
I had thought about dead branches – but hadn’t seen that one when I looked. I never thought it would be the nuts that did me in.
Mike