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WT4FEC · ‎09-14-2017

@57Nomad wrote: With Hurricane Irma breathing down our necks, being in Tropical Storm Warning zone by Saturday morning, and under Hurricane Warnings by Saturday afternoon, we here in North Florida will undoubtedly be without power by Sunday morning. And prior to that, what with the heavy cloud cover, we will be without satellite communication/reception by Saturday afternoon - definitely by Saturday night. It's was an interesting weekend, Governor Scott ordered a mandantory evacuation for East Hendry County for Friday at 8:00AM, including the area I live in, I having no interest in evacuating over a CAT 3 storm got the shutters up took down the HughsNet antenna and set the genertor to standby. On Wednesday the EOC went to level 1 (full operation) and the powers to be decided they had everything under control and advised the volunteers (local Ham's) our services would not be needed. Saturday with the storm bearing down on Hendry, the EOC put out a message seeking volunteers to work Net Control and to staff the shelters, we managed to scrape up 5 bodies, one for Net Control, three for shelters and myself doing storm tracking and forecasting. The county lucked out as the 800MHz system they relied on for communications failed and we became the counties only form of communications for first responders. On Monday we began digging out, there's no power out here so ADSL is down Century Link's RT's are DOA and my cellular backup was running at dial-up speeds, I reinstalled my HughsNet antenna and it linked up and has been working flawlessly ever since. I have been monitoring our repeaters and taking calls from Hams around Hendry and Lee as to where where gas can be found and have been pushing that information out over our maillist, so yes internet here is a necessity and i am damm glad I signed up with HughesNet as a backup plan a few weeks ago, because without it I would be dead in the water and screwed good as I work from home and need internet to do my job and to help out our community too.

WT4FEC · ‎09-12-2017

@BirdDog wrote: I say good on ya! Very smart thinking creating an alignment pin. The mount, pole and dish are not items you ever have to return anyway. Getting the dish and radio inside out of harms way was the way to go. Chances are if left on the pole everything would have been damaged or destroyed including a bent/unset/off vertical pole. The pole is schedule 40 pipe it can take a beating, the dish not so much and the TRIA pole is fragile. While removing and resetting the antenna not in regulatory compliance, I would much rather have my antenna up and operating after the storm versus looking like this. I have done a ton of satcomm work and have a Birdog meter I don't know if ti could be used to properly align a HughesNet antenna.

WT4FEC · ‎09-11-2017

Ok, the eye of Irma passed about 40 miles west of my location, we took a lot of wind, many buildings and homes have roof damage and power failed out at 6:12PM yesterday. We lost a few trees, one of which lost a branch, which slid down the primary hitting my neighbors transformer taking out our power. Prior to the event, I did what a HughsNet subscriber should not do, or is allowed to do and drilled a 3/16" hole through the antenna mounting and supporting pole, once completed I powered down the modem, disconnected the TRIA from the coax, removed the antenna and stowed it in the garage. We then bunkered down and rode out the storm, which at times actually moved the roof a tad. This morning after surveying and photographing the damage outside, I reinstalled the antenna by pushing a 3/16" drill bit through the pre-drilled hole and torqued the mount in place, reconnected the TRIA, powered up the modem and now have internet. Century Link is my primary ISP, their DSLAM went down about 3 hours after the power failed. My second backup is AT&T wireless, however our AT site on St Rd 80 NW of me has backhaul provided by CL and it's backhaul (T1 based) is saturated. So I fell back in HughesNet, somewhat expensive, but guess what it's working and working well and when you telecommute, the expense is minor compared to having to travel to one of our workcenters 90 miles away to do my job. Bottom line, if you telecommute, don't fully rely on land based connections, be they ADSL, T1 or cellular, have a satellite based backup, yea it has latency, but who cares, many of the NMA's most telecommuters I log into are by their nature slow anyway, but with satellite I can stay at home recover from the damage and still do my job and get paid.

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About WT4FEC

Re: Hurricane Irma

Re: HughesNet and Irma.

HughesNet and Irma.