Hey!! Hey!! Hey!! Today is really Christmas morning for us - we get our Datastorm satellite dish installed today. Datastorm is the way we can get Internet ANYWHERE! Yep ... although it is our goal for every RV park to have wireless internet ... we won't be tied to that. We can pull off the road at a rest stop and get online once this dish is installed! Also, how do you sell someone (an RV park) something (wireless internet service)??? You give them a free sample! When we have satellite-based internet, we can be a mobile hot-spot and anyone around us can get wireless connectivity from us. So, it's worth the $5,000 that it's costing us right? We traveled from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa so that RV Anywhere could install it for us. We met Scott (from RV Anywhere) at the Datastorm rally in November and learned that it is very important to get someone who knows what they're doing to do the installation. SO ... here we are, and here are some photos from today:

Scott and helper arrive on the scene:

The Satellite dish weighs just over 100 pounds ... getting it on the roof takes a little ingenuity.




Jim did a great job of supervising!


This part was hard to watch as they drilled a hole in the roof of our home! But, it's not going to work unless there are cables from the satellite dish connecting to our computer, now is it?


... and it looks like they did a pretty good job of stowing all the cables and caulking the hole from the roof side.


Now, they have to make all the cables, modems and routers fit in the cabinetry inside the coach. Looks like it's going to work pretty good.


Here it is! The satellite dish is successfully mounted on our roof in record time. This is the last step of installation, where we had to have a phone line to initiate the connection (a one time thing). We drove the RV over to the park office to use a phone line with a 100 foot cable. BUT ... here is where trouble begins ... installing and using the software that finds the satellite gave us errors. We reinstalled a couple times, switched computers and installed on the laptop ... all to no avail. Scott is researching our problems tonight and will be back tomorrow. To be continued .....