Tuesday 2nd July
Weather - you guessed it. More of the same. Warm and sunny. It got to 28 today and was 12 overnight. We went for a drive down to Boyne Island and Tannum Sands. Lots of new homes going up so development appears to be happening here. The road to Boyne / Tannum is the main one we came into Gladstone on. You just take a left turn about 10km down the road. Along the way are plenty of mangrove flats, so the tide must come very close to the road./p> On the way back we then went for drive around Gladstone and through the city centre. Some lovely old buildings here but no where near as many as Maryborough. Well Clive knew parts of it as he has to collect the satellite dish and visit a caravan spares shop in search of a light globe. Then it was off to the Port of Gladstone, past the Marina and coal yards. There is plenty of green space and parks here too. Next to the Aluminium Smelters and then past what looks like a power station. We might go to the Botanical Gardens tomorrow. Clive successfully set up the satellite dish and VAST Decoder. (More luck than judgement as he got it first go.) There are bits of equipment that help including a compass and angle finder. The dish needs to point 14 degrees from North,(towards East), and 62 degrees from the horizontal. Once he had this pointed to the sky he connected what they call 'The Marriage Saver' and then he had a picture. The idea being that you then rotate the dish to get the strongest signal. Also the LNB needs to be rotated about 30 degrees, skewed,. Sounds confusing? I'm glad that he knew what he was doing. 'The Marriage Saver' is a digital satellite finder, so when you are looking for the satellite it gives you the actual picture on a screen. Once you get a signal you just unplug this device and connect the cable to the decoder. The other way is with an analogue tuner that they call a 'screamer'. This is put inline with the decoder and you then rotate your dish until you hear a scream. So we watched TV via the satellite tonight. It was good to be able to watch an hour of the Brisbane News as normally we get 30 minutes of the local news and then 30 minutes of the Brisbane News. Oh..the simple things of life. At least I'll be able to watch Home and Away now and Clive can have his football back.Monday 1st July
Happy New Financial Year Weather - warm and sunny. The next trick was getting this out of the car once he was back at the van park. The only way to do this was to open the box and take out each piece separately. Then the main box could be folded flat and removed from the rear of the car. Talk about fun and games. Next he sat down to read all the manuals and then he put the dish together. Talk about confusing. There was a DVD that came with it on how to set it up which we both watched. Besides nearly putting us to sleep, Clive actually found it informative as it mentioned things that were not in the manual.