Important Signals

Over the last two days we have been experiencing signal problems. Connection with the Internet was sparodic and poor. My husband went outside to assess the situation.

Well, when you have a satellite connection for your Internet a signal is THE most important item....which goes without saying. Over the years of our satellite Internet connection we have experienced outages caused by the satellite company, modem failure, rain storms interrupting service, vines creeping up the LMB and blocking the signal and the worst, trees and limbs growing in the path of the dish.

We went outside to assess the problem since we found that the signal strength was very, very weak. This is what we saw:

This is a view of the dish from the side

and then, from the back. As you can see, the signal comes down and hits in about the center of the dish. The branch above was blocking it and had to be removed.

We tied off the branch to some trees so that when the final cuts were made, my husband and our worker, Gregorio, could pull the limb towards them so it would fall clear of the dish.

I had gone to the Cay that morning to find someone that I could hire to climb the tree and cut the limb. Gregorio is 60 and my husband a bit older and I didn't want either one of them up in the tree about 40 feet off the ground. I finally found a younger, able-bodied man, Daniel, and brought him to our house. After the tree was tied off with two ropes, Daniel climbed the ladder as far as it would reach and then proceeded to climb the tree.

He started cutting with his machete first on one side then on the other.

The tree was oak and fairly hard to cut. After about 15 minutes he was through and the two men (my husband and Gregorio) who were stationed below supporting the ropes, tugged for all they were worth.

The end result, the tree broke clear (you can just see the break in the photo) and landed on the ground damaging our barbed wire fence but missing the satellite dish.

So, the end result is that I now am back on-line and blogging! What more could one ask for, except ...............