Sunday 19 October 2003

Katherine

I was becoming more and more disenchanted with the effort required to build the base, so Katherine marked the starting point of some experimentation in this area.

Our initial experiment - don't try this at home - was a flop. I had purchased some channel from Bunnings and had it constructed in a way that it would slide into the tow-ball attachment on the back of the van. The idea was to then attach the vertical post to that and support it from below. In an attempt to make it more stable, we attached a side leg to the mount, which did help somewhat, but by this time it was dark and nothing much constructive was really achieved.

While it worked, stable is not a word I'd use to describe this contraption. I was surprised that we did in fact achieve connectivity, which says more about Gilat than it says about this experiment.

We actually camped on a campsite we'd visited before and some of the locals were very interested in all this fan-dangled stuff, so some of the more adventurous offered to assist in the process. It didn't help too much that they were more than slightly inebriated, but eventually we got it all running.