Tom's solution to the internet problem in Bellevue.
Here is my patio looking toward the East. The dish is mostly below the fence level, but the satellite is 33 degrees up, so the signal clears the fence easily. The shiny thing on the right side of the picture is my Isoloop antenna for my HF ham radio station. I'm still trying to get up the courage and try transmitting from that, but want to make sure it puts out a clean signal and not get into the neighbor's tv first!
Back view of the dish facing Southeast over the fence. Looks kind of tight, but there is a very nice clear sky with no trees in the way that I get a great signal from. The sight twist in the dish is for polarizing it -22 degrees. Not sure what that means, but it works!
Closeup of the dish and LMB. The LMB for the internet is the cylinder shaped thingy, and the tv comes into the box behind it. As you can see by the lose ground wire, I haven't grounded the thing yet...shame on me!
A view of how I mounted the dish. Being in a condo, the "Condo Nazis" will scream if anything is mounted on the fence or the wall of the house. I filled a bucket with 1.5 bags of quick cement and dug a hole about 6 inches deep. I then put a concrete brick in the hole and leveled it out as much as I could, placed the bucket on top and filled in the space around it with dirt. Seems to work!
This mess is my entertainment center in my living room. The DirecTV receiver is on the top left corner of the stack on the left. Followed by CD player, Receiver, DVD player, then the DirecPC modem is the thing with the blue on front and it is on top of the computer. The computer is an Athlon 550 with 196 megs running Windows 2000 server. I don't have a monitor on the computer, but just use terminal sever so I can control it from my upstairs computer and do everything I need remotely. I painted the case black so it would match the other toys I have in there. Yes, those are Star Wars Legos on the top, and the P-51 is my telephone! Yes, I'm just a big kid with lots of toys! :-)
Here is a screen shot of a speed test I just did at about 12:15am. This is from my 1.33Ghz Thunderbird upstairs in my bedroom which is running from the server downstairs with the shared internet connection. Not bad, eh? :-)
Questions? Just ask! tegwilym@att.net
