TOOLS TO AID IN SATELLITE RECEPTION

Currently in Goodyear AZ (Low 53 Mostly Sunny and Comfortable High 81) 

We have the best in TV watching, a roof mounted automatic satellite dish from Winegard for high definition DirecTV.  

Plus we have the Genie DVR that we can record 5 shows at once and a Genie client in the bedroom. The challenging part is making sure you have a good line of sight for the best reception. Calling the parks can be part of the challenge. Some parks have a good idea but others do not. We think it should be a requirement if answering the phones that you should at least visit the park once in awhile and know if a particular site has trees or not.

After a few close calls early on we started using Google Earth and that made it better. Traveling across the country can change where the dish is pointed so we needed something better. We are currently using satpointer.com showing here for our park in Goodyear Arizona. The green line shows the line of sight from dish to satellite.

You can switch from map to satellite and check for trees.

You can move the pointer to your actual RV site and zoom in.

Although the line of sight does show some trees we are high enough on the roof to still get a good signal.  If we are heading to a new park to us and we see a lot of trees we use Google Earth and then rotate the image to see the line of sight from the ground. This does not always work since the satellite image may be old and the trees may be taller. We therefore need an aid to help us once we get to the site. We got an app for our smartphone called "satfinder".

Using "satfinder" you can get a sky view and center the circle for the satellite on screen target.

That way you can see if there are trees in the way. In the bright sun this sometimes is hard to see so in these cases the app also has a compass mode using the smartphone getting the direction once the compass reading goes green.

As you can tell we like our television watching.

Till next time,

Bob and Jo