Living underground is interesting, but it makes for exciting conversations on your mobile phone.
Our worst race fears all happened together. First of all, we setup away from the road in a nice quiet corner of the motel. There were no obstacles, but there was a power line overhead. After trying to tune for an hour, we moved the dish and found a signal straight away. Turns out that power lines are not good for satellite signals.
So, then we were tuned and switching on the modem gave us similar symptoms to those seen in Crossing Falls and an urgent call was made to the BOC.
Seeing as I had received email every night without notification of any updates, I didn't expect that again Optus had made a change without a notification. (Not even to the BOC apparently.)
So, with me inside on the computer, an Ethernet cable running 50 meters to the dish and one of the Sungroper Team members standing outside on the mobile, relaying information, and remembering to disconnect the dish from the modem, we again re-programmed the modem to a new set of frequencies.
After 45 minutes we were up and running and all was forgiven.
The location was on the side of a hill, so I decided that some chains and pegs were in order. The next day I learnt that you do need to use a van to pull pegs from the ground and that if you do, some pins bend 90°'s before coming out of what I can only suspect was sand-stone. Suffice to say that the dish didn't move...
