Oh Boy! My Internet is Back!

Oh yeah ... my husband is back too :-) How I love a man who gives me such good Internet! Bottom line - our 'Receive' modem had gone bad. It was old. It is our original modem that we got almost 4 years ago now. That's ancient history with this stuff! Most people in the business have never even seen a modem like ours. Luckily ... *very luckily* we had a spare thanx to Joline who upgraded to new equipment last year and gave us her old modems. THANK YOU JOLINE! Also luckily, we happen to have people parked right next to us who have lots of this similar equipment and who are very knowledgeable.

They're the folks from Maxwell Satellite. They were able to help Jim at a couple of crucial points. First of all, they have satellite dishes, so Jim was able to disconnect our system (the modems) from our satellite dish on the roof and hook it up to their satellite dish on a tripod. They tested their dish and knew it was locked on to the appropriate satellite. So, when our modems were attached to it, and we had the same problem (it would connect and work on the Internet for about a minute, then lose signal), we knew the problem was probably our modems. So, Jim found Joline's old modems and swapped them out. But, here's where it gets sticky. Our Internet Service Provider (not Motosat) communicates directly to the modems, so they need to know about the swap in order to 'commission' them. Jim called them and the person he spoke to said it could not be done. We'd have to open a whole new account, and it would have to wait till Monday. Margo, our neighbor from Maxwell Satellite, said she's swapped modems on their systems before and all you need to do is go thru a re-registration process, an online software thing. Jim did that and voila! Everything is working. I'm writing this blog entry at 4am ... couldn't do that last week! Is this Geek heaven or what? Time to celebrate! There's a winery right at the entrance to the park here, so off we went to do some tasting. And, we topped it off with a lobster dinner! What a great day.

Further your computer education**Subscribe to the Free Geeks on Tour Newsletter**