Starting the Cleanup

It’s Saturday morning and this weekend is a big one.

I’m getting ready to leave Oklahoma. In a little while, I’ll be headed to Bentley to take the first steps toward cleaning up the systems. I plan to spend several hours there if not the entire day, and then head north to Marquette to do the same thing, this afternoon or tomorrow.

You may laugh… some of these things are funny, in a not-really-funny kind of way. Seriously.

But here’s what lies ahead for me:

First, I’ll go through the channels and figure out what channel is supposed to be where. I told you it was funny. I don’t have a channel lineup sheet, and those of you who do have probably found them to be inaccurate. So first, I need to know what goes where.

Then, I need to document my facility. My hope is to find a couple of volunteers willing to drive out to the “head end” to flip an occasional switch or restart/reboot an occasional piece of hardware. These shouldn’t happen often, but equipment and technology are never 100% bullet-proof. Proper documentation will make this process relatively easy even for a person without a lot of technical expertise, and local volunteers will make it much easier for me to restore or investigate outages more quickly.

Next, I’ll be evaluating the quality of the picture and sound on the channels that are working. Anything that’s not easy to watch will need to be fixed, whether this means checking connections, the aim of my antennas or satellite dishes, or something else. If these are relatively simple fixes, I’ll fix them today. If not, I’ll formulate a plan and tell you about it here.

If I have channels that are completely dead, there are a few things that immediately come to mind as possibilities…

• Possibly, the equipment simply needs to be reset, with nothing less obvious than a power-off/power-on sequence.
  
• Maybe, I need to call the network and have them re-enable my receiver (sometimes, they do spontaneously lose their authorization, and the satellite company has to re-authorize them).
  
• Alternately, I could have a defective satellite receiver (takes satellite signals, turns them into raw, viewable video) or a defective modulator (takes that same raw video and inserts it into the cable system on the appropriate channel).
  
• It is also possible, as appears to be the case with Fox News, that the channel may have moved to a different satellite and/or that the channel may have changed the technology they use to send the signal to me – making my equipment obsolete, and requiring that I purchase new equipment.

Whatever I find, I will repair what I can, today. Whatever else may be required, I’ll post updates on here to let you know of my progress.