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Despite my somewhat negative reaction to satellite Internet systems initially, we broke down and bought one recently. We purchased several acres of land in Western Maine in the Spring and the only way to get Internet access there is over satellite. So I figured I’d buy one of these portable systems marketed to RVers. Then we could use it in the RV too.

They system is really a modified version of the DirecPC service sold to homes. They’ve created a special mount for the dish so that it sits on a heavy-duty construction tripod. They also give you tools and software to aim the dish by hand.

The system is marketed primarily to RVers as an alternative to much more expensive units that mount on the top of an RV.

The place we bought it from is Maxwell Satellite. We paid about $1800 for the equipment, and are paying $60 a month for the service.

The bandwidth is 700K down, 128K up. You can get up to 1M down, 200K up if you want to pay $10 more per month.

It works really well for web, email and FTP work. We have a VPN and even that worked good. If you do a lot of telneting, though, you won’t like it. The lag time from the satellite is annoying. I have to telnet to our server and the command line was about 2 seconds behind my typing. Fortunately, I don’t have to type that much, so I can deal with it.

Aiming it was quite frustrating, until I realized I was doing a few things wrong. Then it was a snap. Here is the story.

The first time I set it up was out on our land over the Memorial Day weekend. Setup essentially consists of these steps:

1.) Assemble the dish and level it (using a handy compass/level they include).
2.) Turn on the modem, connect up to it with ethernet, then run the setup software (PC version comes on an included disk, Mac version can be found here). This software adjusts some internal parameters, based on the zip code you enter as your current location.
3.) Reboot the modem.
4.) Open a browser and enter 192.168.0.1 (the default address of router built into the modem). This takes you to the web-based software for actually aiming the dish. You enter the zip code of your current location and the software reports back three numbers you need to aim the dish:

• the elevation - how far up or down you point the dish
• the azimuth - what compass degree you point towards
• the cross-polarization - the skew, or twist, of the dish

5.) You aim the dish according to the above numbers.
6.) You tweak things until you get a lock on the satellite. In order to lock on and work, the signal strength has to be 31 or higher (up to 100). The higher, the better.

Despite my best efforts, I could never get a signal strength above 30. I hauled the dish and all the equipment all over the property trying to find “the right spot”. I even cut down a tree thinking it was blocking the signal.

Hauling everything around was no easy task. Not only is everything heavy, it requires power. Remember, we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I had to cart two 6-Volt golf cart batteries, and a power inverter, to get power to run everything. Here is a photo:

After much swearing and a call to tech support, here are the things I was doing wrong:

First, I was setting the elevation incorrectly because I wasn’t reading the scale right. So the dish wasn’t pointed up high enough. (I could have avoided this by paying attention to the pictures in the manual.)

Second, I didn’t realize there were multiple satellites, and that it was possible to lock on other satellites. The way you know if you are locked on an incorrect satellite is that the signal strength never gets higher than 30, no matter what you do. This is why you have to pay close attention to the azimuth setting, and sweep slowly a little left and right of the initial number the software gives you. If you don’t find the signal within a minute, I was later told, something is wrong.

But these things are fixed when you read the directions and follow the procedures. The thing that isn’t in the directions - and the third thing I did wrong - was I used too long of a cable between the dish and the modem. See, they give you two lengths of cable - one 25 feet long and one 35 feet long. I thought you could combine the two and make a 60 foot cable. Wrong. When the cable gets that long, the signal coming in to the modem is too weak to work.

So the moral of the story is read the manual and use the shortest cable possible.

Once I did those things, boom - a signal strength of 70, and the dish was right outside our RV door.

Now, fast-forward to this trip. I figure “Hey, we have the satellite dish now, we can really stay anywhere - not just parks with WiFi.”

But what I didn’t consider are trees. Trees block the satellite signal. And campgrounds are usually full of them.

I’ve set the dish up 4 times and have only been able to get it working once.

For it to work correctly, you need a clear view of the Southern sky. Actually, up in the Northeast, all you need is a clear view between about 195 degrees and 230 degrees because within that range is where the signal will be found.

Overall, I’m happy with the dish since we are primarily using it on our land, and I know how to make it work there.

But if you are traveling around with one of these, just be aware that trees are the enemy.

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