Maintenance-and-mods on Geeky Nomads

Foretravel Powertech Generator Voltage Regulator Replacement

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 13:45:00 -0500

Power Powertech Generator

I thought I’d detail our voltage regulator replacement on our generator. A lot of people have done this procedure wrong and their generators caught fire and burned up or worse.

This is how it’s done on ours.

Long Range Wifi Gear in an RV

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 11:07:30 -0500

So any self respecting geek is going to want internet access. The average LTE plan is ridonculously fast anymore (I’ve seen 50Mbit down in rural areas) and feels like a home connection. That’s great but they are usually limited unless you are particularly crafty. As a result most people tend to try to use wifi. For many people this involves turning on your laptop, trying to connect and bitching that it doesn’t work. In parks that have park wide wifi with many repeaters this isn’t usually the case. Usually a tengo type park works but it’s generally pretty slow. I’ve found that it’s often due to wifi congestion but sometimes the backhaul connection to the internet service provider is the problem as well.

Needs Better Antenna

But in our travels we figured out quickly that there are MANY parks who have free wifi - in the office. The best sites are generally not near the office. We quickly decided to acquire some wifi gear. The first was this (note ours is the older TL-WA5210G). The Nanostation M2 is essentially the same device rebranded and with better firmware. It’s a better choice.

Ubiquiti NanoStation locoM2 2.4GHz Indoor/Outdoor airMax 8dBi CPE

TP-Link CPE On Pole

It is basically a weatherproof wifi access point built into an antenna. It can operate in client mode or router mode. The neat thing about this thing is that it avoids the huge signal losses that result from a long antenna cable. It is 12dBi but it works as well as or better than a 15 or 16dBi antenna/router separate combo with even a very high end cable in the middle. When you get this access point you get a long ethernet cable. You plug this antenna into one side and on the other end is a power injector. Then you plug the other end into your rv based wifi router. It’s just like plugging into a cable modem. Because of the power injector you only have to run one inexpensive long ethernet cable and you can go HUGE distances with ethernet with no losses in signal or throughput whatsoever. Every additional foot of cabling between a router and an antenna adds losses ordinarily.

The issue with this device is that it’s a bit flaky. We’ve even gotten a replacement and sometimes it just disconnects for fun. It also can take a very long time to connect for seemingly no reason. If you know the wifi is there, you see it in the scan and the signal is high enough, it will connect, but it might take 5-10 minutes. The good part about this is that it has a signal strength meter on the back with LED’s. This isn’t like a browser based signal meter. It is instant and updates many times per second. It really helps you aim the antenna precisely. Sometimes moving the antenna one to two feet horizontally can make ALL the difference.

Yagi Experimentation

Another thing in my collection is a stack of MI424WR routers. These are the actiontec routers that come with Verizon FiOS service. They are dime a dozen and indeed these were given to me for free. DD-WRT never worked on these routers so they always sat in a corner but I found out at some point I could install openwrt on it. Why does that matter? Well most router firmware can only act as a router. That is your laptops can connect to it and it can serve you internet. With aftermarket firmware you can almost always operate as a wireless CLIENT or bridge. In that case the router becomes more like a cable modem that you can then plug into another router to bridge your short range wifi devices to a long range connection. An MI424WR with OpenWRT is now my go-to for long range connection because it does go a bit further with this kit. I have that router plus this antenna. As a warning, it’s fun to play with DD-WRT and OpenWRT on routers but it’s incredibly easy to “brick” these routers. A bad firmware flash is all it takes to kill them and they become unrecoverable without soldering a JTAG connector onto the board. Still, if you don’t pay a lot for it, and the revision you buy is supported, I highly recommend learning about it.

Tupavco TP512 Yagi Wi-Fi Antenna 2.4GHz 15dBi H:30° V:25° Outdoor Directional Wireless N-female

plus this cable

TRENDnet Low Loss Reverse SMA Female to N-Type Male Weatherproof Connector Cable (8M, 26.2ft.) TEW-L208

Once upon a time we used this antenna

TP-Link 2.4GHz 24dBi Directional Grid Parabolic Antenna, N Female Connector, Weather Resistant (TL-ANT2424B)

24dBi Directional

It looks cute right? Like a mini satellite dish? Hehe, it’s massive. A PVC pole is not even close to strong enough to hold it up and it really doesn’t do much if at all better than the yagi I posted above which is much more compact and can stay on the mast while travelling. In a permanent installation I’d consider the 24dBi antenna instead but we need to remain mobile so the smaller yagi it is.

Low Interference - Long Range

But why bother, why not just use the flaky TP-Link CPE I first discussed? Well the issue with that is the firmware kind of sucks. With openwrt you can see a lot more information about the access point such as the security type. You can also run wireless tools like packet dumpers, etc on openwrt. In general it just gives you more flexibility. On the other hand the range isn’t quite as long as the 12dBi CPE. I often make use of both of them at the same time. One connects to the wifi to download movies while the other provides browsing internet. This works well on limited connections and allows us to use “double” our quota (okay not really since we are two people).

But I think before anyone outlays $50-$100 on wifi gear the question on everyone’s mind would be how well does it work? The answer to that question is well enough to use but not well enough to depend on. If you try to do IT work on this connection you will start to look like a real asshole to your clients. When Voip calls drop, screen sharing and presentations die randomly. When you can’t get into a client machine because the wifi is down right now, it’s just unprofessional. Indeed in a situation where you are trying to reach across a park full of other rv’s things can get really interesting. Whenever someone operates their microwave it is enough to disrupt the weak signal. Other wifi interference across the park makes things bad too. The final nail in the coffin comes from other users.

Hidden Node Problem

The effect is called the hidden node problem. Normally it’s not too big of a deal with a bunch of household wifi users but on a long range directional link it becomes a big problem. With wifi users must know of each others existence in order to help avoid interfering with each other. Otherwise it’s like two people with ear plugs both trying to talk to a third person at the same time without knowing when the room is quiet.

You see the antennas here have a gain. Rubber ducky antennas are 3-9dBi. The panel antenna in the TP-Link CPE is 12dBi. And the satellite dish one is 24dBi. What is gain? It’s not that this antenna boosts the signal. In fact the signal is weaker due to cable losses. Radio signals emit out from a normal antenna in a spherical pattern. When you use a rubber ducky antenna it focuses the signal into a 360 degree pattern more like a Tourus. The signal travels vertically far less. This focusing of the power works both ways and allows further horizontal signals to be received and transmitted. Because of the assist to both transmitted and received signals, this is helpful no matter what kind of antenna and router is on the other end. The panel antenna and yagi focuses the signal much further, this time into a single direction. The pattern is horizontal and directional in about a 30 degree cone. Despite the fact that this is such a cone, precise aiming can still help you eek out better transfer rates. The 24dBi satellite antenna must be fairly precisely aimed or else it simply doesn’t work at all. This can be useful for isolating interference somewhat (but honestly microwaves still trash the signal).

What kind of range? Well take a rural environment like Illinois where there are vast soybean fields and you have line of sight to the building the router is in. 1.2 miles or so. If there are any trees in the way you can’t achieve more than a couple hundred feet. If BOTH sides are cooperating (both are long range antennas, set to high power, pointed at each other), you can achieve many MANY miles. In practice we can generally hit 500-1000 feet without too much trouble. If they put the router in front of a window, much further. If they have an outdoor antenna placed high up, MUCH further.

And what about these 1000mw high power usb devices like Alfa USB dongles?

Alfa Network 1000mW High Power Wireless G 802.11g Wi-Fi USB Adapter with 5dBi Antenna AWUS036H

They are actually nearly useless. Most routers communicate at 18dBm or so. The thing about wifi transmit power is that it must be the same on BOTH sides. Otherwise one side will be able to reach the other but not vice versa. In effect your range is still limited to the transmit power of the weakest device. Think about it carefully and you’ll get it. Another effect is that signal reflections and other issues can actually cause higher transmit powers to work less well. Indeed I find that setting my MI424WR to 17dBm (instead of the 30dBm of a 1000mw transmit power) results in better signal. Setting higher than this eventually stops working, I assume due to the transmitter overheating. Perhaps better hardware can handle this. The TP-Link CPE 12dBi panel antenna mentioned above works well at 27dBm - but it doesn’t really seem to help range because as I said - it is limited to what the other side is set to.

Conduit Ladder Mount

So given what wifi is, if you still want to bother with it, these external antennas need to be mounted. Our solution was to use metal electrical conduit and conduit hangars attached back to back to our ladder. It works well enough but it can loosen up over time and cause the pole to drag. That was the source of our one catastrophe. Also in case you’re wondering, mounting the antenna or CPE on a long pole very high up almost always improves signal unless there are a lot of trees. Then often you can get a better signal at ground level because there are fewer leaves.

Dragged Pole

The final elephant in the room here is whether or not all this is worth it. I’d say about 40% of the time it works without trouble and about 60% of the time I struggle with it and spend hours tinkering with it. In fact for most people I would say that this stuff is an absolute total waste of time. For the average person I’d say an LTE plan and a Wilson Sleek 4G is all you need. I think the Botts of http://www.outsideourbubble.com (who I hope we can call our friends, we had the distinct pleasure of hanging out with them at the Grand Canyon) have it right in terms of wifi gear. They use a Ubiquiti router (I think a Bullet) connected to a permanently mounted Omni antenna on their roof. No tinkering - either you have signal or you don’t. Takes 5 minutes to check. No directional aiming or other business. Kind of like Solar panels for someone that doesn’t boondock year round. Economically it is completely nonsensical. When you can acquire a super quiet inverter generator from Costco that can recharge your batteries or run your microwave for $600 that will run for 10 hours on 1 gallon of gas producing 15kwh in the process, solar panels start to look a little insane. The average 600watt setup won’t produce that lab rated power in the best of circumstances and the amount of time it even gets close is just a few hours per day. Such a setup generally costs thousands once you have solar controller, cabling and installation costs settled. I’d argue solar money is much better spent on additional battery capacity. That can really improve your quality of life only having to recharge every few days. The point is that it’s fine if you have fun playing with this stuff, but if you’re just trying to get online, get some work done or download some movies it can get very frustrating and time consuming. From a simple time perspective, say you earn $50/hour doing your work. If you spend 4 hours a month that is $200 that you could instead spend on an additional bad-ass verizon LTE plan that will work better than ANY campground wifi nearly anywhere you go. Every now and then this fact rubs me the wrong way but then I realize I didn’t want to actually work anyway, and the alternative is just sitting around and doing nothing. Often this wasteful tinkering has made me money in the end anyway. One of my clients had me set up a long range wifi network between a few of his convenience stores cutting out some big FiOS bills for him. Then there is the other thing too that if you spend 9 months out of the year somewhere as we now have to because our son is in school, hitting free wifi can save you a lot of money and the time spent on the initial tinkering becomes worth it.

Cutting the Cord While Full Time RVing

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 12:57:31 -0500

Every now and then I have the rare treat of geeking out with some of my most technical readers. This is one of those times. LOL I’m kidding, nobody reads this. But anyway, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about here I would recommend hitting Google and figuring things out. Knowing this stuff can earn you lots of money as full time RVers. Everything IT can be done remotely and if you have a formidable IT skillset you are in demand…

Hey Buddy

Cutting the cord - aka a ridiculous phrase coming from the same clowns who brought you the word cloud. If you get past silly C level friendly terminology, the idea is to get your media - music and movies from the internet instead of a paid cable or satellite subscription. The typical way this would be done is to use Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc and stream it. Obviously this is a big big problem for someone on a 10GB LTE data cap. Personally, while we have a grandfathered Verizon LTE plan, I try my very best to not abuse it which means using campground wifi for media. This also means that the streaming services are out. What I do instead is queue up my media on a server with a proper internet connection and then download all that media whenever I have a good connection. If you don’t have such resources I would recommend looking for one of the many VPS providers that have accounts for $60/year with more than 100GB disk space available. Ramnode is a good one. You could put things into AWS S3 as well which would be pretty cheap but less convenient for this exercise. After you have enough media the task becomes to transfer it from your server to your own systems where you are at.

Trees Ruin Signal

The problem is that even with copious amounts of long range wifi gear (seriously it’s bad in our rv, 3 antennas, 4 cables, 6 routers) sometimes it’s simply not possible to reach the wifi. Actually this is a whole other subject I have a lot of experience with that is going to be a whole other article. It’s going to be titled something like “long range wifi gear is a collossal waste of money”. Anyway, in our experience a lot of campgrounds have free wifi but only at the office.

A Pwnie in it's native environment - CC Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Now for a bit of recent history… In the hacking world there is a device called a Pwnie. The idea behind it is a small computer that you nefariously dispatch in a hidden location within a corporate office of some unwitting company in the hopes that you can get around their firewall. Most companies have very few restrictions on outbound communications so get a device inside and communicate OUT and you’ve got your window. Most places really use the firewall as their only serious line of defense too. Once inside the network you can access pretty much everything in short order whether it’s through weak passwords, unpatched systems, etc. The original Pwnie is just a Marvell Sheevaplug SBC with a special Linux distribution and an inflated price. Because certainly hackers can’t customize their own Sheevaplug and save some money. Whatever ;)

Marvell Sheevaplug

Anyway, I happen to own one of these devices bought years and years ago as part of my “failed due to apathy” pool automation business venture. The nice thing here is that we’ve come up with an actual legitimate use of a pwnie versus the rare occasions when someone pays me to penetration test their systems. This device though, as small as it is is a brick. That was then and this is now. These days you can buy a similar computer that is the size of a pack of gum.

Rikomagic MK802 IIIS Dual Core Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Mini PC RK3066 1.6Ghz Cortex A9 1G RAM 8G ROM HDMI Wifi with 2GB micro SD Card and Power Adapter

This has built in wifi and can take a 32, 64 or even 128GB micro SD card. You can probably guess where we’re going with this.

As it turns out these devices are not exactly huge power hogs. 4 AA batteries rigged up to it can power it for 10-12 hours. I happened to have a Sony PSP battery pack lying around so I used that. I simply chopped up one of my numerous USB cables and soldered it right into the case of the battery to provide power. The inaugural run didn’t work well so I cracked open the case and extracted the antenna. The second run was a marvellous success, downloading 2.5GB in just a few hours. The PSP battery isn’t great though and was pretty dead after a 4 hour run. I’ll probably have to do something bettery for batteries eventually.

There are MANY ways of making this happen so you are really limited only by your imagination. I installed Lubuntu on my old school (original) MK802 system. This is worth probably $20 now. I put in a $4 16GB micro SD card and used a damn near free battery pack for it. If it walks away I simply have to invalidate an ssh key and I’m good to go. So quite simply you boot this thing up with a Linux distro installed on the Micro SD card, and use rsync to sync with your server. I made a script and simply added it to /etc/rc.local and viola, the MK802 boots up and starts trying to download media from my server. My script looks like this

#!/bin/bash<br />
# Trap interrupts and exit instead of continuing the loop<br />
trap "echo Exited!; exit;" SIGINT SIGTERM<br />
# Set the initial return value to failure<br />
false<br />
while [ $? -ne 0 ]<br />
do<br />
 sleep 1<br />
 i=$(($i+1))<br />
 rsync -av --progress --partial --timeout 15 -e myuser@myserver.net:~/sync/* .<br />
done

My little battery powered wifi Pwnie

So what’s going on here? We simply retry rsync indefinitely until it succeeds to download our stuff from our server. Note that you’ll have to use key based ssh authentication since you won’t exactly be around to enter the password. Walk over and get the wifi details ahead of time and set it up as a hidden network. Save everything to the MK802, walk it over, hook up the battery and dump it. Come back and pick it up later. You can verify that it’s working by doing a ps ax | grep rsync on the server side. If you see an rsync process you know it’s connected. Now, you can be parked a huge distance from free wifi, and can download huge amounts without waiting around. Awesome! A pwnie with a legitimate purpose!

So that leaves the final 4 concerns:

What if it walks away? Who cares! It costs less than a month worth of LTE. Invalidate the SSH key and move on. Be ready for this possibility and accept it. Hope it doesn't happen.
Where can I stash it? Numerous places really. I put mine in our mailbox at the office which about 50 feet from the wifi. You could put it on top of a railing, on top of or behind a soda machine, behind a bush, etc. The key is that as long as nobody sees you toss it and as long as you go pick it up before falling asleep for the evening, most likely nobody will see it and snag it.
And probably the most important thing - remove your wifi credentials from the device. If you forget and you turn it on when you get home, it will download everything over your own connection. Kind of defeats the point.
If the wifi has some sort of gateway that you have to accept you'll have to do that manually. I recommend a lapdock which is basically an HDMI screen and USB keyboard/trackpad you can hook up to whatever device (with some adapters). People use these things for Raspberry Pi's for instance. I found one on ebay a long time ago for $20 and it really does the job with these tiny headless boards.

Another way you could do this is with an old cell phone, but somehow I suspect an old cell phone would walk away a LOT more quickly than a $35 SBC with no screen even if they are actually similar value.

Eternabond is an RV's Best Friend

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:11:24 -0400

Because an RV just can’t do very much with diamonds. There is no single thing that can damage an RV more quickly and completely (except maybe a car accident or fire) than water. When we bought the Winnebago we bought it knowing that it had water damage. We made a calculated risk and it paid out alright but we always worried a bit about the side wall delamination. We never could tell if there was any structural issues. We weren’t quite at the stage of our rv maintenance where we were willing to pull the windows out and attempt a repair.

The Patient

On your average house, at least where I lived, water penetration is avoided through the use of layered asphalt shingles. The water runs down the roof. Water that does not run down the roof and gets in through cracked or broken shingles rots the plywood and sometimes the structure underneath. At this point the roof is redone to the tune of $10,000 more or less. This isn’t possible in quite the same way in an RV. The laminated construction doesn’t lend itself to being repaired easily or in a way that is visually undetectable. When it comes to water leaks in an RV, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

It should be no surprise then that most of the major manufacturers void the warranty if the sealant on the roof/sides isn’t checked on and repaired once or even twice a year. Most of them use a self levelling lap sealant and believe me, it’s seriously low quality stuff. With our new motorhome it seems more attention was placed on ensuring clean lines than there was on ensuring absolute lack of leaks. When we got our current one we detected leaks in 2 windows that we remedied and one of the front clearance lights leaked shortly after we brought it home. It felt odd to pay so much for a motorhome and have it leak in the same month but such is life.

The leaks were a painful reminder that as nice as our current home is, it’s still an RV and it’s still important to go over the seams. So how do you go over the seams. Well lets see, you climb the ladder, you go up on the roof and you look at each penetration. Ok the sealant looks good. Seriously, every leak I’ve ever found in either the Winnebago or the foretravel the sealant looked pretty good. In fact, no amount of effort stopped the leaks in the Winnebago until we got the magical product of awesomeness - Eternabond.

Eternabond is a line of products that mainly centers around a tape called Roof Seal. I know what you’re thinking… A TAPE?! No seriously, you can’t imagine this stuff until you touch it. It’s almost like a non-newtonian fluid. We’ve decided to use eternabond as an insurance policy. We know the main sealant underneath a particular flange is what has been sealing out the water, but we would like to ensure that it’s not going to leak. Eternabond tape has some ridiculous lifetime like 10 years. With proper surface prep you really do get the life out of it too. And it seals very well. Things will NOT leak. The only downside is that it’s a bit ugly. But this is a ROOF. If you uglify your roof you prevent a leak which will seriously uglify the interior.

Acetone - A good Cleaner

So I have experience now with hundreds of feet of eternabond and I can say there are just a couple things that are important with regards to application but they are REALLY important. 1) The surface must be as clean as you can get. This means scrubbing down the surface with a compatible cleaner. With plastics and fiberglass this means acetone or MEK. Both are pretty noxious chemicals that handily eat through my nitrile gloves. Have a whole box of gloves ready. 2) The tape must not touch ANYTHING until it is where you want it.

Closeup After Cleaning

Once it sticks whatever tape you manage to get off will be stretched and ruined anyway. 3) When you apply the tape spend many many minutes applying vigorous pressure to all areas of the tape. It is pressure activated more so than anything. We didn’t buy the roller they recommend but we spent a lot of time pushing it down with our fingers and have never had any come up.

Aside from that applying eternabond is as easy as applying tape. The only other noteworthy thing is that I like to apply from the rear of a penetration to the front. This makes for no exposed tape lips that are stuck to other eternabond tape pieces. Without the primer eternabond will stick better to fiberglass than itself. We figure the driving wind/rain on the highway is the most abusive.

Measure

Peel the Backing and Stick

Layer from Rear to Front

For those wondering where you might buy Eternabond, I’ve found the best source is RV Upgrade store. My favorite product is probably the 4” Roofseal in White which is pretty universal but the 2” Roofseal works well for vents as I demonstrated above and can save you some cash.

PS: Our roof has the new Foretravel ceramic armor coat multilayer roof coating. It is kind of like rhino liner. I was pleased with how the eternabond stuck to it and it seemed to do a good job getting into the nooks and crannies that this roof surface creates.

Foretravel U320 Condenser Fan

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 18:50:58 -0400

Buying a used older motorhome is not for the faint of heart. Things will break and more things will break. Right around the 10 year mark things really start to go wrong and the previous owner of our motorhome felt that for sure. Because I don’t have any certainty as far as when things were repaired I decided to do basically all of the routine maintenance at once.

Rewind back to when we bought the coach - the a/c compressor clutch was fried. This is the air conditioning system built into the dash that works when the big engine is running. I didn’t think much of it at the time but I made the dealer replace the compressor, evacuate and recharge the system. The system was fully charged when they pulled the compressor so I didn’t make them replace the drier or other stuff though I probably should have.

A New Condenser Fan

The tests went well and we went on our way. Fast forward back to now, while I was running the big engine to test other maintenance I was doing I had the a/c on to exercise it and make sure it was still working. The coach was in high idle and running for about 20-30 minutes. I noticed on one of my trips from the engine to look at the gauges that the a/c wasn’t very cold anymore. Sure enough I looked at the condenser fan and it was stopped. Later on after things cooled down I ran the a/c without the engine running and the compressor fan was working.. Hmm.. odd. I let it go a few minutes and strangely it started to go slower, slower, slower, stop. A few seconds later I heard the circuit breaker pop. Sounds like a toasted motor to me.

As it turns out on these coaches an SCS Frigette system was used. This company went out of business. My first thought was to get a new motor and a helpful ForeForums member suggested I go through the pictures on ebay to try to match the motor up to what was for sale on there. I found a few but without dimensions how can you be sure? So I went to autozone. As the counter clerk and I perused random condenser fan motors he asked “Why don’t you just replace the whole thing? We have universal units”. Hmm.. I didn’t think of that. He pulled out a universal that was the same size as mine, same thickness and appeared to have the same mountings. When I got home it turns out the mountings aren’t precisely aligned but nothing a few heavy duty zip ties can’t solve - after all this isn’t a critical part. While getting the old unit out, 2 of the existing screws broke in half as they were seized into their joints so I didn’t have new mounting hardware anyway, plus the new fan came with zip ties as the recommended mounting method!

A couple cut connectors, soldered joints and electrical tape later and wow, their universal fans are serious business. The amount of air moving through there was quite a bit more than before. It was only $64 which was cheaper than the cheapest ebay motor alone and cheaper than the $175 or so new old stock from Foretravel. So I’m happy, as long as the cheap chinese part holds up anyway. Time will tell but I saved the receipt and box ;) If you get one of these make sure the blades are installed right for pusher and puller mode (read the manual). If the blades are on backwards it moves next to no air.

I won’t explain how the a/c system works entirely but basically you can understand the failure mode of the previous a/c compressor if you think about it. Nominal high side pressure is probably somewhere between 250 and 300psi. When the condenser fan stops working high side pressure rises very quickly until a high pressure side cutout switch is triggered probably around 400psi. Maybe more. Imagine driving 8 hours down the road with the a/c system sort of working so you continue using it. The system is sitting right at the cutoff pressure cycling the compressor on and off repeatedly. Each time the compressor starts the clutch has to catch against 400psi and a high revving engine speed. Do this long enough and boom, clutch fried. The foretravel system is very dumb. It has a high and low pressure switch and the compressor runs constantly I believe. There is no intelligence whatsoever so the system has no way to decide that something is wrong and give up use of the compressor. That combined with infrequent use causes a lot of failures of RV chassis a/c systems in general. Use the system often if you have it and make sure your outside fan is working.

Also changed the engine oil, filter and fuel filter in the generator, a PowerTech 12kw diesel. The generator is on a slide and it went pretty much like you’d hope - easily.

%$#& Fuel Water Separator!

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:01:04 -0400

Today we tried an experiment. We tried to make a video… And we figured out that we are not the Wynns… We will never be YouTube stars. I can’t stop cursing long enough to make a video that isn’t all bleeps. Oh well. Of course I should mention that today probably wasn’t a fair shake due to the misery that I subjected myself to. You see I decided to change the fuel water separator and clean out the prefilter. For those that don’t know, this is a fuel water separator type filter and is very easily accessible. It has a normal oil filter type filter and then a metal bowl that goes on the bottom. Super easy, how hard is it to change an oil filter right?

Beaten and Bruised But Finally Loose

Holy crap. I spent hours trying to pry that thing off with all manner of tools. The metal bowl spun off easily enough but the filter itself would not spin off the top. I spent hours cursing the mechanics at Cummins who last touched the system in 2010. I broke 2 rubber strap wrenches, I stabbed the filter with all manner of screwdrivers and prybars. I used vice grips and all manner of tools to try to extricate the demon filter all to no avail. Finally I gave up in disgust with a sore shoulder and went to Harbor Freight where I found the magic tool that won the battle. A long handled oil filter wrench. It looks more like a giant pair of pliers and this thing is really cool. It actually works with pretty much every filter we have to change on any vehicle. So alas the job is now done and after yet another educational scare where I learned about the Cummins automatic fuel vent all is well. (It dumps fuel on the ground - or your swiftly placed drain pan once the air is purged)

The Winning Tool

We still have to change the main fuel filter but since I’m not doing that after the nightmare day it I just wanted to get fuel back in the system. Phew. It’s always the easy jobs right? The funny thing is for all the cursing I did about Cummins I had to overtighten the new one exactly the way they did. You see the metal fuel bowl has a pipe that connects to a drain solenoid and basically the bowl on the bottom has to be aligned precisely the right way. The only way to get that alignment is overtightening ¹⁄₂ a turn.

Replacing Coolant and Hoses

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:46:23 -0400

For us buying a new motorhome inevitably means doing a large amount of neglected maintenance. Couple that with the fact that this is our first diesel and that means that this is quite the learning experience. Our new engine is the Cummins M11 Celect+, also known as the ISM. Ours is a pretty early (for cummins) electronic injected common rail diesel engine. This type of engine offers (typically) a bit better gas mileage and there is no lift pump to fail - BUT - it has expensive injectors and high pressure fuel pump to fail. As with most things, it’s give and take but our priority was power and we have it.

Radiator Drain Plug

One of the most important differences between a gasoline and wet sleeve diesel engine is that coolant doesn’t just matter - it’s critically important. Diesels operate at a far higher compression ratio than their gasoline counterparts and one of the side effects is that the sleeve the piston rides in bounces back and forth at such a velocity that a cavitation bubble is formed and instantly contracts. This effect degrades and eats at the cylinder liner resulting in potentially massive engine damage.

Coolant in a Walmart Tub

The good news is that modern H-OAT coolant is a bit of a different chemical makeup than coolants of the past and allows you more or less trouble free running for up to 4-6 years and 300,000 miles depending on who you ask. The use of test strips can have you go longer.

As if these fancy coolant requirements weren’t enough drama, stickers on our rig indicate that it was drained and filled with Texaco ELC coolant. This coolant happens to be the subject of a large fight between cummins and Texaco because some property of the coolant caused it to attack silicone - a product used in gaskets and hoses on cummins engines of the era. This causes leaky rocker arm cover gaskets as well as other issues. We don’t have any leaks that I can tell but we shouldn’t reuse this.

So after all this drama and tons of internet research, I come to find that Fleetguard ES Compleat OAT coolant is the same reddish/pink color, compatible with even large amounts of existing coolant (and thus a drain and fill versus a flush) and is absolutely the one coolant recommended by cummins. Score…. Except this stuff is EXPENSIVE. $13/gallon - and this thirsty beast requires a whopping 18 gallons! To hold the coolant we used a 19 gallon rubbermaid tub from walmart, one of the better stronger looking ones. I filled it with water first to make sure it would hold and help us prevent creating an EPA violation. It held the coolant just fine until we filled with new coolant. Then we used a $7 harbor Freight transfer pump to move the coolant from the tub into the now empty new coolant bottles.

Brass Ball Valve To Interrupt Heater Hose Flow

As part of this process I replaced the cracked couplers between the steel coolant pipes and the fancy custom aluminum radiator. Also replaced heater hoses and installed a valve on the one heater hose. Why? One day I was checking around the engine and realized it was hot! Convection currents were causing our aquahot to heat the engine (using the preheat feature) but in reverse and not intentionally. Finally I replaced the horrible awful insane rubber boots that connect the coolant pipes to the transmission cooler. Wow, they did NOT want to come off.

Coolant Box Hoses - Replaced

When we finally refilled I was able to get in all but 1.5 gallons. After starting I felt the heater hoses at the front of the coach heating up so we knew coolant was flowing through that system - no trapped air pockets. All in all the job is pretty much what you’d expect if you’re experienced doing it on a car. Thankfully we didn’t spill a drop of coolant.

When you do a job like this, make sure to replace all of the rubber bits that go near hot parts of the engine. They are the parts that tend to degrade and burst, losing all of your new expensive coolant. These engines have coolant filters. If you go to a dealer they may tell you to use a WF2071. This filter is designed for long haul trucks and cannot handle the length service interval that motorhomes may have. As such for motorhomes make sure to use the WF2321 (if you have an ISM). Basically - there are different ones, make sure you get a good one. It will cost you dearly but the engine costs a lot more! If you want to change just the filter, there is a bypass knob just above where it mounts. This lets you take off the filter without losing a bunch of coolant.

A Tale of Dead Batteries

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Buying a used coach comes with the unique experience of constant discovery of new things hidden away. These things are someitmes good, sometimes bad. Our 1998 Winnebago Adventurer 32 came with a very factory supplied looking 200 watt-ish inverter that powers the tv, vcr, etc. One of our first modifications was to install one of our two sets of Bose Companion 2 speaker and subwoofer setups. Last year on a lengthy trip to Florida, we wre suprised when halfway through the trip the inverter shut off. We didn’t think much of it and started the generator to charge the batteries (because we did see that the converter did work).

Motorhome Batteries

Fast forward to today and several tests later we came to the conclusion that our house batteries were pretty well done for. They could power our tube TV drawing 200 watts for mere minutes before shutting down so we knew it was time for replacement. After doing a lot of research we came to the conclusion that the stock Magnetek converter supplied with our motorhome was doing it’s very best to fry these batteries so we nabbed a fantastic deal on an Intellipower 45amp converter/charger on ebay. This converter has 3 stage charging and has very good maintenance cycles to ensure the batteries don’t get overcharged and boil away. Since then we’ve used the generator on every trip and have not had an issue but I noticed once again that after a night of running fan the battery wasn’t charging with the engine running. When the “aux start” button was pressed, a thump occurred behind the dash but the voltage of the bank wasn’t changing as you’d expect when you connect the chassis battery to the coach battery.

Battery Charger/Converter Underneath our Oven

I suppose a small backstory would be nice for the non-technically inclined. Basically a motorhome has 3 distinct electrical systems. One 120 volt system with standard household outlets, one 12volt “coach” system which in our case has 2 deep cycle batteries connected in parallel and is also connected to our inverter/charger. The final system is a 12volt system that powers chassis electronics like fuel injection and the engine starter. This has it’s own battery but that battery is designed more to give off a lot of power for a short amount of time (to satisfy the demands of an engine starter).

When it comes to how these systems are interconnected, the answer is extremely fuzzy, even amongst similar model numbers. Copious amounts of reading schematics, studying forum posts and other powers of deduction lead me to realize that there is a solenoid that connects my chassis and house battery banks together under certain conditions and that that solenoid isn’t working. A forum post explained it that on Winnebago’s like mine (indeed since way back in the 70’s), the run position of the ignition key (as well as the dash “aux start” switch) sends power to this bank connecting the batteries. The purpose of this is so that when you are camped you will not drain your engine start battery but while your engine is running the alternator is able to charge your house batteries. This alternator charging of our house batteries I now confirmed is supposed to happen but isn’t.

Battery Mode Solenoid

Here is the culrpit. It is quite a common part known by many names and brands, namely a Camdec 97226. I purchased a replacement part made by Tekonsha from Amazon which had a very ominous review attached. Apparently this particular reviewer’s solenoid was not manufactured very well and the crimped cap popped off. The internal solenoid bridged to ground and started a fire for him. I decided to hedge against this by wrapping the assembly in electrical tape hoping that it is strong enough to hold back the spring forces of the solenoid. Time will tell I suppose.

Camdec 97226-WR Solenoid - 3 Post

With some spousal assistance I located the chamber which housed this solenoid and the solenoid itself by asking her to repeatedly turn the ignition from run to off and listening and feeling for the clunk.

Battery Mode Solenoid Location Under Hood

In my coach it is behind a box labelled “Battery mode solenoid and relays”. Fitting enough. This box housed the solenoid to completely disconnect the coach batteries from the house 12v system (for storage or maybe something else), and this unit works fine. The other solenoid we were looking for was well buried and took a lot of effort to remove. It’s important to note that you are working in a box that has very large power lines in close proximity with very large grounds. If you were to play inside this box without disconnecting ALL batteries, AND household AC so that your converter isn’t powered, fantastic fire, explosion and personal injury could result. Take proper safety precautions!

Wiring Exposed

After wrestling the old unit out and installing the new one it’s fairly easy to see the source of the failure. Now bearing in mind, a direct connect solenoid is probably the WORST way to accomplish charging your coach batteries from the alternator, the implementation in my particular motorhome is an abysmal failure. Leaving a voltmeter on my coach batteries and cranking the engine you can see the coach batteries dip down to 10v. Yes folks, the geniuses connected the solenoid to a line that is hot in both the run AND start positions. Attempting to crank the motorhome while this solenoid is engaged each and every time you start the motorhome will kill it in short order. There is also some question as to what happens when your generator is running, converter is charging and directly connected to your chassis battery as well as your alternator. Can you back feed an alternator? Is that bad for it? Who knows!

Ford F53 Motorhome Fuel Pump Replacement

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 22:12:19 -0400

We had problems with our fuel pump. At least that’s the operating theory. We didn’t do a whole lot of diagnosis for reasons I will explain. It all started when we crested a hill after a long climb on a 98 degree F day. The motorhome died completely. We coasted down the mountain with a dead engine and came to a stop in the chain removal lane. The motorhome would start but it would sputter and die in a few seconds and the symptoms just screamed fuel to me. We waited an hour and still no dice so we went about getting help. Before we left I had my darling crank it and I could hear the pump making angry noises so that made me all the more sure I pinpointed the issue. We broke down in an area with no cell phone service so we had to disconnect and a couple hours later when we got back the motorhome started and ran so we drove it to the nearest campground to lick our wounds and figure out what to do.

The Process of Dropping the Tank

The normal google research really pointed to the fuel pump being the culprit. I had already replaced the fuel filter before this trip. The motorhome has been displaying evidence of fuel starvation. It’s been pinging under load and it has been stalling right on a cold start suggesting the fuel pump wasn’t supplying nearly enough pressure. Recently the check engine light came on for oxygen sensor lean condition. This was a huge warning flag that I somehow ignored thinking the O2 sensor itself was bad.

The old pump

When the park we were staying at welcomed us to change our fuel pump in our site we decided we’d be idiots not to so we decided to forgo additional troubleshooting and blame the pump.

Part of the reason we were quick to blame the pump without much fanfare and diagnostic work was because the pump is a known problem. Our motorhome has a build date of ³⁄₉₆ and before ⁶⁄₉₆ Ford used a gear driven pump. After ⁶⁄₉₆ they replaced this pump with a completely different turbine pump. Now you can order the updated pump from RockAuto.com (currently $380) and you’ll be tempted to order the $82 airtex pump or some other brand but this is a bad bad idea. First of all, the job kind of sucks and if you pay someone else to do you’ll be paying a lot of money because the job sucks. Secondly all of the other pumps have a bad reputation just like the pump you’re replacing. So using anything but the updated ford pump is a waste of money.

Some people blame the fuel sock. There is a filter sock that the pump draws up fuel through and if you have some rust in the tank break away it can clog the sock. This wasnt the case for us. The sock was discolored but not even close to clogged.

The way we did the job was to pick a site that was built up a bit as you can see in the picture. You put a small floor jack under the rear of the tank, loosen the front center tank bolt, remove the front and rear straps and then remove the rear tank bolt. Then you have to remove the filler and vent tube. Removing the filter and vent tube completely sucks as there is no easy way to access the clamps. Just do your best and be patient and eventually you’ll get a ratchet on it. Once you get off the filler tubes you can drop the tank from the rear and then there is enough room to access the fuel pump.

The new motorcraft pump

You CANNOT do this on flat ground! Not unless you jack up the rear of the motorhome. Basically even in my case the old pump came out really easily but the new pump is longer and has a fatter diameter of the bottom part so it wouldn’t go in. I had to jack up the rear of the motorhome, remove the floor jack and dig out where the tank hit the ground in order to gain enough clearance. The new pump also has a spring loaded mechanism to make it stick to the bottom of the tank. Zip tie this in order to shorten the assembly as much as possible and then cut the zip tie after it’s installed.

The fuel lines are quick disconnect and you need the proper tool. They are the same as A/C quick disconnect tools and I had some on hand to do the fuel filter. You need different sizes so get the kit. The fuel pump has 3 lines connected, pump, return and generator.

Now the old style pump is supposed to have 3 wires and the new style pump is supposed to have 4 wires. In our case we had an old style pump with 4 wires! Imagine my surprise. This is lucky because RockAuto didn’t include the jumper harness they are supposed to. You are supposed to cut the end off of your 3 wire connector, splice in the 4 wire connector and solder and heat shrink tube the connection. The mind doesn’t have to work too hard to imagine what fun soldering that close to the open fill tube could be. You could get the job done by leaving the connections hang down beside the tank and then put it back in place. Then you can solder with no fumes escaping and hopefully avoid any explosions (technically soldering with an iron shouldn’t cause an explosion but it seems risky to me). So even though Rockauto didn’t include this jumper harness for us (make sure to call and ask or order it separately as it is SUPPOSED to be thrown in) it all worked out and the new pump plugged right in.

We started the motorhome and it ran without spewing fuel everywhere so I buttoned everything up but we have yet to take a long test drive. Fingers are crossed. I’m just glad I found an old style pump in there. I’d hate to do all this work and find out it was a wild goose chase.

And by the way, here is a link to what I believe is the right pump on Amazon. We bought it from Rockauto.

Motorcraft PFS48 Sender and Pump Assembly

When Air Conditioners Work Too Well

Fri, 16 Aug 2013 13:59:54 -0400

One morning we were surprised to wake up to a brisk 59 degree bedroom. Given that the thermostat was set on 73, obviously something was wrong. Our motorhome has dual ducted central thermostat controlled air conditioners. Although people are quick to call a repair man, issues with these units are typically easy to diagnose. Before we get into it, one thing you should know is that these units are factory filled and sealed with no way to check or fill the “freon” (also properly known as refrigerant) level.

The board in place with wiring attached

If you are having cooling problems you have basically 3 options - clean the filter, clean the coils (inside and out) and use a fin straightener on the outside coils.

The way our particular air conditioner works is that the thermostat on the wall receives +12V from the coach battery system and sends it out via various wires. I know this because I changed our coleman mach thermostat to household digital thermostats some time ago in order to better regulate the temperature. The rest of the operation can be derived through basic troubleshooting. When the thermostat on the wall engages a click will be heard at the wall, the relay in the thermostat. A few milliseconds later a relay in the roof unit can be heard clicking. If AC power is being delivered to the unit it will turn on.

New Relays - Ready to go

In our case the second click at the unit was not working for the compressor. Only for the fan. Deduction tells us that the compressor relay seized shut. I opened the unit and found a board with 3 relays. I ordered all 3 (actually 2 sets, for the front in case that ever went) and when they arrived I went about replacing it.

Replacing it is a matter of removing the board, keeping track of everything connected, desoldering the offending relay and then soldering in the replacement. This is easier said than done! In our case, the legs of the relay fit into the holes very snugly and as a result when desoldering and pulling the entire via came out. The via is a metal tube that connects the top to the bottom of the circuit board.

Board with one of the non-offending relays removed

The result is that a circuit connection that was made before is no longer made. You have to trace these connections manually and add wires to the board to make the connections again. Once I figured everything out, soldered on new wires to repair the damage we were back in business. This board is sold for a lot of money by itself but I replaced all of the relays for around $10.

The Missing Story of Satellite TV

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:45:31 -0400

For many people TV is a big part of life, and that is no different for us. We loves our TV and though I was originally a bit embarassed about that I’ve come to embrace it. When it comes to this subject, I thought I knew a lot but nothing gives you an education quite like an RV. When we bought our motorhome, a nice feature it had was a roof mounted automatic satellite. We quickly learned that the “automatic” feature didn’t work. We learned that through manual pointing and slow movements we were able to finally locate a satellite with it despite the fact that it was broken. That’s when the education started. I will note that when it comes to articles like this, it really makes me happy that our site is called “Geeky Nomads” and thus an expectation of tech talk is implied ;)

Superdish Satellite

There is a lot more to satellite TV then we originally knew and understanding the nuances can really help you out in the long run. Your options range from basic all the way to magnificent and you need to be educated in order to make sound decisions and understand what you want a why. When it comes to the normal satellite TV technology you see today there are two providers, Dish and DirecTV. Some satellites are shared between them but there are differences and hardware for each is not compatible with each other except the old stuff. I have Dish, and I know Dish so this article is about Dish.

When Dish Network™ is installed at a house, a superdish or “turbo hd” dish or 1000.2 or if you’re ultra lucky a 1000.4 dish is installed. This dish is kind of a wide fat dish and one of the things I didn’t realize when we got our rv is that this roof top dish actually points to 3 satellites simultaneously. There are 3 little LNB eyes on the arm, and the satellite is bowed so that it reflects from different points in the sky to the different LNB’s. Pretty clever. The one on the roof of our RV can point to one satellite.

Winegard Single LNB Satellite

Less clever. As the channel lineups have grown over time and HD content has been added the requirement has been added to point to multiple satellites to see all of your content, and often a third is required to see your locals but in my area on the “eastern arc” (more on that later) I can get by with just 2 satellites (a dish 500 setup). But since I had the 3 satellite setup on the roof of my sticks and bricks home, that is what I am using.

So to go back to basics here, Dish first came out with a satellite with a single LNB. The LNB is the little eye on the end of the arm that receives the signal. The most fundamental thing to understand is that unlike cable there is a lot more than you think happening on that coaxial cable coming out of the LNB. You cannot simply “split” the signal to attach more receivers and you most certainly can’t just hook the coax cable up to a tv. A radio signal is a wave and it has a concept of polarity. A nice benefit is that you can send two signals down the same frequency by make the polarities opposite of each other, allowing double the amount of data to be sent from a particular satellite. The original LNB could only use one polarity at a time which was commanded by your receiver. changing the voltage going to the LNB If two receivers were connected, they would fight over the polarity whenever both receivers wanted channels on different polarity. The solution to this was called a “dual LNB”. On a dual LNB there are two coaxial outputs. Two cables were run inside, one to one receiver and one to the other. Then each receiver could use whatever polarity they wanted and all was happy in the world. A dual LNB is not to be confused with a “twin LNB”. The twin LNB is actually TWO dual lnb’s side by side. a dual LNB only actually has one “eye” it’s just that it can operate in both polarities simultaneously. A twin LNB is used for seeing 2 satellites simultaneously.

Dish DVR Installed

But alas things get more complicated and the world moves on. People wanted 4 and 6 room setups and so a “switch” was created. This device allowed many receivers to talk to a dual LNB setup and patched the receivers through to the LNB that had the polarity they wanted. Even this wasn’t great, you still had to do a double run of cable from the dish (per receiver I think) and the setup still had limitations with crazy amounts of switches and connections. It was because of this that Dish came out with their current technology called DPP. (Dish plus plus). DPP had a number of benefits, but one particular one is that you could do a single coax run from a satellite dish to a receiver.

DPP Separator

Yet another trick came about, Dish created special DPP receivers that had dual tuner setups. This allowed one room to watch in HD and a satellite room to watch in SD. The single coax went to the receiver and the signal for the second tv was backfed as an analog tv channel using various adapters. DPP also meant that the single coax feed could feed the two tuners but this only works in a DPP dual tuner receiver through the use of a DPP splitter (which incidentally looks identical to a normal cable splitter but isn’t).

So what does this mean to the geeky RVer? Well if you’re a normal geek you download your TV/movies from the internet from various services like Hulu or even RatBay if you’re so inclined. The problem is that on the road, bandwidth is really hard to come by. Park wifi is more or less shit while cell plans are limited to 20GB a month at best. At 300MB per hour of TV, you can suck up that limit very very quickly. Some research proves that coffee shop bandwidth is often limited to 1Mbit which is not great for downloading huge amounts of media from a server somewhere on the internet. The solution to this problem is to move from a downloaded setup to a DVR setup. In our case we got a Dish 722k DVR. In order to use a DVR you really need at least a dual LNB setup, and if you want to see all your channels you need a twin dual LNB (points at 2 satellites and polarity can be switched internally). This type of dish requires a skew setting and our roof top dish didn’t cut the mustard. Other roof top dishes say they support HD and it’s true but the trick to them is that they often don’t support multiple satellites simultaneously. When you tune the channel, the dish repoints. The issue with this is that if you are watching tv from one satellite and content to DVR is on another satellite - game over.

So we know our rooftop dish is inadequate and we’re shopping. We know most of the motorized dome type dish can only look at one or two satellites (often just one), have rain fade due to small dish size. Our automatic dish was also no longer automatic because it was locking onto satellites that it didn’t expect to be there. It didn’t realize that new satellites were put up because the new satellites never got programmed into the firmware confusing the hell out of it. The control panel was not able to sniff the signal to understand precisely what satellite it was seeing when it found a satellite and the guess was wrong. Only in the rare occasion that the offending satellites were obstructed did the automatic satellite finding system work. And speaking of obstructions 9 times out of 10 they were an issue with the roof top dish. Often the motorhome is positioned in the perfect place to block access to the satellites. Now there IS an automated rooftop dish that does meet our needs and that is the Wineagard Trav’ler Dish 1000. You can see the difference between this unit and the dome type, it’s huge and is not camouflaged in any way. It also cannot work “in-motion” and keep your tv going as you drive down the road. The price is over $1000. In light of the roof top obstructions we decided cons of a rooftop system could not outweight the positives and opted to remove our Dish satellite from the roof of our sticks and bricks home and get a tripod.

Tripod Azimuth Setting

A tripod setup is literally what it sounds like. You mount the dish to a mast sticking up out of a tripod and aim it manually. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds but isn’t paricularly simple either. Our tripod setup is from TV4RV and we make no bones about it, it’s insanely expensive for what it is. But through my now keenly trained, eye it is worth every penny. It has fine adjustments to make leveling the tripod easy, the dish satellite is WAY WAY bigger than you think it is (unless you’ve pulled it off your roof and actually handled it, you’ll be surprised). The tiny flimsy tripods from ebay are all designed for the older Dish 500 setup. We paid a lot for the TV4RV tripod but now that we have everything and actually used it we couldn’t be happier.

SuperDish Adjustments

The condensed aiming process on the tripod is to open the tripod, put the compass on the tripod and loosely aim the tripod toward the satellite you need (as displayed by your dish pointing guide on the receiver which gives you elevation, azimuth and skew numbers). You rotate the tripod until the compass points at your azimuth (left to right) heading. Once you have that right you set the tripod down and push the legs into the ground. Remove the compass and use a bullseye level to make the top of the tripod perfectly plumb and level. Once this is done you loosely bolt the satellite mast onto the tripod. Now you set your satellite skew (rotation kind of like a steering wheel), elevation (how high it is pointing in the sky) and then you slowly move the dish left or right (azimuth) until you find a signal. The first time it took me quite a few hours. I’m getting better ;)

So to condense your research here is what I’ve learned. A modern DPP LNB has the switch BUILT IN to the LNB itself. This means that a DPP receiver over a single coax can see each LNB eye and control polarity independently, further with a DPP splitter, a single cable can handle TWO tuners (as in a DVR unit). When AIMING however, your satellite finder is NOT A DPP DEVICE. This means that if you hook it up to the first port you are seeing the signal of the first eye only. Thus your single cable should be on the middle of the 3 ports. THIS is the LNB you have to aim for in order to get all 3 satellites. The 3 satellites are for the eastern arc, 61.5, 72.7 and 77 and for western arc 110, 119, and 129. These numbers are the literal positions of the satellites in orbit. When you get coordinates for a 3 satellite system, the coordinate is for the middle satellite so aim using 72.7 or 119. Peak on that satellite and then fine tune your skew in order to peak the other two satellites (I don’t usually bother with this). There is a perfect dish for RVers and that is the Dish 1000.4. It is a slightly larger version of the fat boy 1000.2 dish. The LNB’s from different dishes are NOT interchangeable. Notice the proximity of 61.5, 72.7 and 77, The eastern arc. 77 and 72.7 are much closer in number than 61.5. This means that an eastern arc LNB is special. Two of the eyes are closer together and one is off to the side. The western arc LNB is evenly spaced because the satellites are spaced. It’s hard to hit eatern arc satellites when you are out west, and it is hard to hit western arc satellites when you are out east. Dish was going to migrate to 1000.4 only and so they produced an eastern arc AND western arc LNB for this dish, meaning you can buy both LNBs and you are SET. The 1000.2 only has a western arc LNB for it. Dish decided the 1000.4 was too expensive so they stopped producing western arc LNB’s for it and are going back to the 1000.2 setup for people out west. This means a 1000.4 western arc LNB is going toget rare, which is why I bought one on ebay now rather than have to pay more later. Another little known fact is that dish local channels are “spotbeamed”. This means that rather than a signal that can be received all across the country, the locals are generally sent in a tiny beam only to their intended local location. The result is that as soon as you start travelling out of your “home area” you lose your locals basically immediately. Dish is the only one I know of who has cracked this nut perfectly. The 722 receiver has a built in OTA module and the 722K has an optional $50 MTR2-OTA module that will allow you to pull in HD over the air local channels. The guide data for these channels is magically pulled down from the satellite and your DVR can record from these without using up satellite recording channels. And the DVR automagically updates ot hte new channels when you move. This means you can tell your DVR “I want to recover “The big bang theory”. That show may be broadcast on Fox 29 in one area, but once you move that channel is gone. The DVR schedule will find the new schedule on the other channel. This is a perfect solution, especially when you consider most RV’s come with an excellent amplified Winegard TV antenna.

Dish DVR TV

Thus my final setup is a tripod, with a 1000.4 superdish connected to a DVR via the middle port on the LNB using a heavy duty TV4RV tripod. The DVR has the 2 satellite inputs split using a DPP splitter and thus can record one channel while watching another. The winegard tv antenna goes to the OTA input allowing a 3rd recording option for OTA channels so up to 3 watched/recorded channels simultaneously. Our recordings are about a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ split between network and cable channels so it works perfectly. And that’s that. Simple and easy to understand. Not!