This morning I installed some new Satellite TV gear I received while in Park City. If you are interested see the “Technical Break” below. We had an excellent lunch at Outback and we went back to Camping World to pick up an item I forgot yesterday. We then went to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. This is a very cool park and was the highlight of our time in Las Vegas for me. Our annual National Park pass got us in for “free”. I was surprised at the very long line to get in. Most were paying $15 per car to enter. It took about 15 minutes to clear the entrance gate. The park features a 15 mile scenic drive with trail head and scenic areas all along the route. The first turn out was Calico Hills and was my favorite area.
Technical Break …. Ok, if you’re not interested in tech stuff skip this…. Before we left on this trip we were frustrated with the RV satellite receiver. It is a single tuner which means we could not record one channel and watch another. The house receiver is a 3-tuner device so you can record 3 programs at once or watch one and record two. Before we left I asked Dish if I could upgrade the RV to the same as the house and they said it was against their policy to allow that receiver in mobile applications. Arggh! I read on the forums where people took their home receiver on the road when they left. So before we left I tried out our home receiver in the RV and the RV receiver in the house. The swap seemed to work fine. We quickly discovered on the road however the home receiver was not happy on the road. Only one tuner was working, many channels were not available at all, and there was no signal from two of the three satellites. Crud! I researched the problem and found that for the home receiver to work properly I needed a device called a solo-node in between the antenna and the receiver. Back in Anthony TX I bought a HD over the air antenna to attempt to watch the Olympics. No-go. The HD antenna worked OK but couldn’t receive NBC where we were. Before leaving for Park City I ordered the RG6 coax and solo-node so I could attempt to restore full functionality. The solo-node requires two coax inputs from the antenna versus the one input required by the RV receiver. I received the coax and solo-node while at the Wyndham in Park City. Yesterday we went to Camping World and bought the roof sealant to run the new coax lines to the solo node in the RV. Today I installed it. The good news is the receiver is now much happier. I receive all satellites and the self check no longer shows errors. The bad news is, we still don’t get local channels. I think this may be a result of no longer being in the Dallas area but I’m not totally sure. This afternoon I reconnected the OTA antenna and we get all of the Las Vegas broadcast channels. Why did I bother? Donna really wanted to watch the Academy Awards and it was on a “local” channel. Well at least that worked….for a while. Just as the Academy awards were getting to the main awards the ABC channel went dead. The rest of the channels remained OK. Some kind of popular show “blackout”? Kind of similar to the Olympics where we could get other channels but not NBC. Dish also makes an OTA antenna to USB adapter to integrate OTA channels with the Dish programming, including recording. I guess I’ll try that soon.
Back to our regularly scheduled blog.