Satellite Farm

A view of all three members of our farm.

My Internet savior...it looks like a spy device or laser gun.

The new dish that allows us to have local channels.

Living rurally, as we do, there are advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is not having decent Internet service. We had dial up. That reached the point where you could barely check your email. We then got a Sprint air card. That seemed so much better than the dial up that we were happy for a while. When we heard that the newest tower out this way was ATT, we decided to switch our phone/Internet service to them. It was great for while, much better than Sprint. I mean, watching Youtube was an exercise in patience. You would have to wait 10 minutes or more to watch a 3 minute clip. Having 3 bars of service was cause for celebration.

If you are friend of mine on Facebook, you are acquainted with my Internet troubles this summer trying to take a class. Not having taken a college class in about 16 years, I was introduced to Blackboard. Everything is done through Blackboard: assignments, messages, grades, and anything related to the class such as articles to be read, discussed, and wrote about. I knew this through my children, but I was personally introduced to the this modern concept this summer. On about my second day of class, ATT decided to go nuts on me. It first started out with spotty service, and then went to no service what so ever. I spent a total of at least 10 hours on the phone trying to find out the problem. I was told anything from they were integrating towers to they did not know what the problem was. I was reduced to stopping at my local McDonalds to use the free Wifi. After several weeks of that craziness, we decided to just bite the bullet and take a step toward 2010. We got Hughesnet! For $10 less per month than we were paying for the ATT aircard, we now have wireless Internet service via Hughesnet satellite. I can blog, Google, Facebook, read the newspaper, and watch grandchildren videos from anywhere in the house. Up to six computers can take advantage of this modern technology. I am happy with Hughesnet.

We started out with the least package you can get. When I told the guy what we use the Internet for, he told me that package would work for us. It does, except when Daniel comes home and tries to download a movie(this aint Baton Rouge). Through the fair usage act, you are only allotted so much usage per day. If you go over, the service slows down to a crawl. Daniel was unaware of this and tried to download a movie. I called the automated service number and learned that you get one free service restore a month. Within minutes we were back in business and I did not talk to a human being, just a series of me punching phone button and hearing weird beeps and noises on the other end. Modern technology never ceases to amaze me.

To continue our voyage into the modern world of technology, Randy decided to take advantage of Dishnetwork's many offers of free HD for life and free local channels. This is a complicated story in itself. We did not have local channels through Dishnetwork. Randy's brother told us to tell them we used the satellite at a camp up at Toledo and we could get local channels there. I mean we paid for the service. We had local channels...out of Shreveport! We could watch LSU football though and we were happy. Although our TV is HD capable, we did not have the box for that because they wanted to bring it to the camp. When Dish offered local channels a couple of months ago, we took them up on the offer. We no longer have service " at the camp". We do have local channels here though. It is so great to watch Channel 7 news! As far as the HD, I honestly do not see a big difference, except now we have a new satellite receiver and remote.

Now the reason for my devoting a blog entry to this subject. We now look like a satellite farm here at 316 Bruce Hyatt Road. The Hughesnet is a much bigger dish than the TV dish. It is also pole mounted, as it would not be hurricane friendly. The new TV Dishnetwork dish had to be pointed at the southeast sky rather than the southwest sky, so it was pole mounted as well. Our old Dishnetwork dish is mounted on the side of the house. We were told to leave the old dish on the house to make sure the new one was going to work properly. We do not have any problems, so hopefully we will get the old one down before long......Randy?

So, if you drive up to our house and feel like you have just stepped onto a military installation, feel at ease you are welcome here. We can search the Internet, watch John Bridges on Channel 7, and watch anything in HD. Our next moves into modern technology is possibly dropping our land line and I am also thinking about Skyping....too many grand babies to keep up with!