Back in Iowa City

Yesterday we drove back from Keokuk to the West Overlook campground, a day earlier than we had originally planned, so we can help Chris get his house ready for going on the real estate market tomorrow. We thought it would be relatively easy to find a first come-first served campsite. It would have been--except for problems with the camp office internet connection, and problems the attendant had with their new booking program. It took several hours before it was finally worked out.

We had set up on a nice campsite (at the advice of the attendant that it was available throughout our planned stay). Now we'll be able to stay here until 7/8, when we'll move over a couple of spaces for the remaining 3 nights. We're now going to try to conserve tank space so we can dump when we make the move. Eight nights is more than we would usually go, but we expect to spend a fair amount of time at Chris's, and we've learned some techniques to avoid filling the wastewater tank. We'll see what happens.

We set up our tv and internet dishes yesterday. The DirecTV dish was as usual a cinch. We are working to streamline our process on setting up and pointing the internet dish, but that's still a time-consuming process. It took us all afternoon yesterday, but we've drawn up a personal flow chart to make the setup and pointing more efficient. Finding the satellite is more difficult than the tv satellite. The space we're aiming at is much tinier, and the precision required is much greater, since communication goes both ways. Once we've found the satellite and "peaked" the signal (maximized signal strength), then we have to pass the cross-pol test. The Hughesnet National Operations Center has to verify that the dish is carefully skewed to avoid interfering with other users on the same transponder. That is a tough test to pass. There are a multitude of things that can go wrong with the process. It's not exactly user friendly, but Hughes is not officially supporting mobile use of the dishes, so they expect that a professional installer will put the dish up and point it one time--on the roof of a fixed building.