The satellite dish arrived yesterday. So today I had no end of fun pointing the dish. You see, the bearing had to be set to just a smidgeon* to the left of Alpha Centauri.
*smidgeon = half a parsec, or 29,000 light years give or take a kilometer
Then I had to set the elevation to 29.5 degrees Kelvin, assuming the complete verticality of the mounting pole, which I found to be just a whisker* out. The skew was minus 22 degrees, which is anti-clockwise in case you were wondering.
*whisker = 2.5 semi-inches
Fun fact: the statellite (to quote Delboy) is 38,633 km away. So it is very difficult to see, and impossible to center in the crosshairs of an optical viewfinder (if you happen to have one, which I don’t).
I’ve been up and down ladders all day so I’ll now be able to enter the Olympic ladder-climbing competition if there is one.
After all of that, I finally obtained a satellite lock. Then the fun really started; configuring my router to connect to the satellite modem. I won’t bore you with further details, but the end result is that we are now online via satellite. Oh, I see. You thought that because you were reading this post, our Orange internet connection was back? Shame on you.
So sucks to Orange; they can fiddle with the internet connection as much as they like now; we don’t care.
And if you’re in France, I can recommend this chap: http://steve-pritchard.fr/
Here’s our previous connection speed with Orange, on the rare occasion that we were actually connected:
And here’s a screen print of our current connection via satellite. Not done through the same website as above, because it’s not a DSL link. I think it may be a bit exaggerated, as the connection speed is advertised as being a maximum of 22Mbps. But it’s still faster than Orange:
And obviously the characteristics are different because of the latency (which could cause problems if I was into online gaming – I’m not – or if using VOIP – which I may want to set up later if I can ever find a USB handset which works with Windows 7). Using the web is slightly different; there is a slight delay in fetching web pages, but once they start loading it is fairly fast.
And whilst on the subject, in local news, our village is loudly proclaiming that fibre-optic connections are now available (in the village itself only, of course). Provided by Orange. With a photograph in the local paper showing the blistering results of the speed test from the same website as shown in the first photo above. Now bear in mind fibre-optic is capable of a gigabit speed i.e. 1000Mbps. So what speed do you think their test results were showing? Here’s the photo which appeared in the paper, which can be found online at http://pierrefitte-sur-sauldre.fr/sites/default/files/bulletin_ndeg46_0.pdf (just in case you thought I had used photoshop on the photo):
And now that we’re no longer using Orange for the internet connection, the phone line seems to be working again.
Oh yes – and LSS is now using Bouygues for her mobile. Reception seems a bit better; she can now even make telephone calls (although she does have to be in the garden, standing on a chair, with the phone held horizontally to do so). We have now ordered a Bouygues sim card for my mobile as well.