SaskTel

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Antenna Day

Today was the day to mount my booster antenna onto a 20′ foot pole and get the pole mounted to the cabin. The goal of this was to improve my signal stability, get my antenna off my neighbour’s property, and get the antenna cable off the ground.

Croft and I have been working on this project for a bit and I really owe him a bottle of good Scotch! He’s helped me work through all the steps and solve issues, like the fact that I couldn’t actually wrangle a top heavy 20′ pole and get it vertical!

It was a lot of hard physical work, mostly while balancing on a ladder, but I got it done!

For the pole, I used the two 10′ sections of chain link fence top railing. This was perfect because the pieces are meant to fit into each other, making for a 20′ foot pole that I could actually fit in my truck!

So here it is:

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Croft suggested I secure the pole in the ground with cement, but that was too permanent with impending construction, so I dug a hole and then wedged the pole in between a bunch of rocks. It’s secure!

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To get the pole vertical, I laid the two pieces on the ground, with the antenna end against the building. I then slotted the two pieces together and secured them somewhat with duct tape to keep them from separating:

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Croft suggested I secure a rope to the pole, climb the ladder, and then use the rope to pull up the pole until I could grab it. What worked better for me was to lift the pole as high as I could and lean it against the building, climb up, grab the pole, and then very, very, very careful ease it up. It was very top heavy and it wouldn’t have taken much for it to pull me off the ladder so I was extra cautious!

I had already secured a block of wood to the eave to bring it flush with the roof, so once the pole was almost vertical, but still angled enough to stay in place on its own, I quickly secured the top with strapping.  Croft had also suggested a U-shaped clamp to secure the top of the pole to the eave, but the home stores in town didn’t have the right size. One clerk suggested I use flexible plumbing strapping. Croft thought it would be too flexible for the job, but I believed that it could be molded to provide a much tighter fit. Hate to say it, but I was right. 🙂 The pipe is completely immobile. For this step, I just secured the banding loosely to hold the pipe while I adjusted the antenna’s direction, and then I went back up with several more screws to get the tight fit.

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After doing the preliminary securing at the eave, I went back to the ground and gently pushed the pole up so I could get it into the hole and secure it with the rocks.

Croft also advised me to secure the wire to the pole to take a load off the connector. So I gathered up all the loose cable and secured it with a zip tie and then secured the bundle to the cable with another zip tie.

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Finally, how did I mount the Yagi to the pole? As it turned out, I had what I needed, I just didn’t know it! I’ve been using a U-shaped bolt and a clamp with teeth to secure it to the broom handle I’ve been using for years, but that didn’t give me enough grip for mounting onto a metal pole. Well, I found another clamp with teeth while I was emptying out the junk drawer the other day! I forgot to take a picture while the pole was on the ground, but my camera’s zoom is amazing:

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(Here’s another view of the materials, but there’s only one clamp with teeth. I wound up with two since I had to buy several antennas to get one that worked well.)

My signal strength is now going between -83 and -88 when I was getting between -87 and -110 before (usually sitting at -95). Before doing all the final securing, I tested a download, ie. some critical system updates. I went from an estimated download time of +4 hours with the download timing out every five to ten minutes to an estimated download time of 30 minutes and no timeout! I’m not seeing any improvements while surfing the web, however.

This was a big job but worth it! My internet setup looks a lot less hillbillyish (with all due respect to hillbillies).

My only concern about this is that I’ve lost the ability to bring the Yagi to Mexico as there is no way I am taking this apart! I have another antenna that I think will work well, so I’ll have to get some coax cable for it and find the necessary connectors. I didn’t use my phone much on Isla last winter, but I was always glad to have the ability to do so thanks to the booster since service in the heart of the village was poor.

I am still not going to promote the booster I am using because I am not impressed with it and don’t want to give Wilson any more publicity since they are such a horrible company. Let’s just say that I should have plenty of range to use my phone anywhere within a 125′ radius of my office and that I go from -87 to -120 when I step two feet away from the inside antenna. Well, at least I get that -120 now. I was getting no signal when I did that before today’s exertion. 🙂

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A Much Needed Domestic Day

I’ve been back at Haven for just over a month now and today was the first day that I was able to just focus on home. Now is the time to confess that I wondered what it would like to return to teeny tiny Miranda after a winter of rattling around in my huge Mexican casita. Well, it’s been wonderful, so cozy and comfortable. I’m in no hurry to move!

Before beginning the domestic stuff this morning, I started some updates for my computer since I wouldn’t need it today. Unfortunately, I had to cancel them a few minutes ago after trying all day to get them downloaded and my connection repeatedly timing out. I called SaskTel yesterday and we determined that there actually is something going on with my account, but they can’t figure out what until my billing cycle resets in two weeks. *sighs*

While the computer was busy, I set to work in the kitchen. It’s been feeling very chaotic since I got back, mostly because of the under sink leak and not being able to put things away under there. So I spent some time cleaning the area well, making sure that there were no other leaks, and put things away.

Then, I decided to empty out and clean my pot cupboard since I found some weevils in my soup pot the other day. I’ll spare you a picture, but let’s just say I’m glad I’m not squeamish because I found weevil central. And by weevil, I mean little critters that look like tiny worms, not necessarily actual weevils.

Since I had to wash everything in that cupboard, I decided to do some much needed scrubbing of my pots and pans with Barkeepers Friend and some steel wool.

I’ve been using the same set of Meyer pots and pans since I moved out on my own in 1998 and I have made thousands of meals with them. Needless to say, they get pretty crusty and covered with grease and scorch marks, no matter how hard I scrub them after making a meal. So a couple of times a year, I do a big scrub and restore them to a mirror shine with the Barkeepers Friend and steel wool. It’s a process that’s really hard on my hands, even when wearing gloves (!), hence why I don’t pull out the BF after every meal.

I did this to the lid of my soup pot in just the last couple of weeks after using it as a lid for my cast iron pan:

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That black stuff is all under the lid, along the rim, and it goes right to the top of the lid:

And after a few minutes of scrubbing:

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Once my pots were all shiny, I put everything away again and took the time to reorganize the cupboard a bit as well as some of my overhead cabinets. Then, I washed all the cabinet doors.

By this time, I was beyond ready for lunch, so I finished up the zucchini and chicken I had for dinner last night. I still can’t believe that I have found a use for zucchini outside of chocolate cake. It is such a wonderful replacement for pasta.

After lunch, I started the dishwasher, collapsed in my chair, put my feet up for a bit, and read for a couple of hours!

Speaking of the dishwasher, it is amazing. 🙂 It is exactly the right size for my kitchen. It lives between the bookcase and the canned good cabinet, leaving me ample room to access both, and it’s not in the way to climb the ladder to the loft. I can pull it out, turn it, and bring it to the sink without having to move anything. I haven’t had any use for that space since I lost my cats, because that was where I stored their litter box, so the dishwasher doesn’t feel like it’s taking up any precious space.

It also gives me the little bit of extra counter space I needed for my food processor and tortilla press. I use both too often for it to be worth storing them between uses.

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I am really happy I bought the dishwasher. It is a huge improvement to my quality of life.

Late afternoon, after cleaning the dressing room, I went for a walk. It is very smoky and hazy out there. Saskatchewan is having a record breaking dry June and we are having tons of wildfires. I’m not sure where this smoke is coming from, but I know that the northern part of the province is burning, so I imagine that the smoke from there is drifting south. The conditions remind me of my first Klondike summer, when Yukon was plagued by wildfires.

When I came in, I made a giant pitcher of lemonade. All the recipes I found had the proportions as being 1 cup of sugar to 1 cup of water to 1 cup of lemon juice, and then dilute as needed. Since I don’t do much sugar anymore, I only used a half cup of sugar and it was still way too much. Next time, I’ll do just a quarter cup. I really like lemonade when it’s very hot out as it seems to quench thirst better than just plain water and I haven’t had it in eons. For some reason, there are no lemons in Mexico, so I do ‘limonada’ there, which is limeade. Tasty, but not the same!

And then, it was time for dinner and I didn’t feel like cooking. So I went to the grainery to get a quarter of Co-Op’s amazing frozen ‘deluxe’ pizza (peppers, pepperoni, sausage, onion, black olives), quite simply the best frozen pizza I’ve ever had (they also do a yummy chicken and pineapple over BBQ sauce pizza!). I buy the pizzas on sale (3 for $9.99). They are a little soft by the time I get home, so open them up and use scissors to cut them into quarters, rewrap, and toss in the freezer. Then, when I have a day when I’ve been active and my kitchen is perfect and I don’t want to mess it up, it’s easy to pull out just as much pizza as I should be eating at one time.

While the pizza was baking, I went outside and dug a hole for my antenna pole. I might actually get that project done one day. It’s just that I have service now and every time I play with the antenna it takes ages to find service again. So I really need a full day for this project. Maybe this coming Friday will be the day…

I’m so glad I got this day off before starting the new job tomorrow. I feel like I managed to reboot my brain. I’ve had a lot of technological frustration in the last few weeks, so having a day away from the computer did me a world of good!

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Bell Mobility Mifi Impasse

It’s been three months since Bell Mobility sent me yet another Mifi device and that one has also bit the dust, right on schedule. I spent almost an hour on the phone with Bell this afternoon, most of it wasted after I got disconnected by them (I was in town, so it wasn’t my connection) and the people I had spoken with hadn’t taken notes. *sighs*

Bell’s position is that my warranty is expired, so if I want replacement devices until the end of my contract, I have to pay for them. I asked about canceling my contract (11 months left on it) and they said sure, with a steep penalty. I forget the exact amount, but it’s more than the total $110 in minimum monthly payments that I will pay if I ride out the contract.

My position is that if they’re going to lock me into a contract, they should provide me with a device that works. It’s not like I keep losing or dropping them! If they can’t do that, then they should allow me to cancel without penalty and go to Novatel for the cancellation cost. Needless to say, they weren’t hearing me very well.

They acknowledge that the device is crap and that they have nothing else to offer me for my current plan and told me that I should take my fight to the manufacturer, Novatel. Oh, you mean the company that is impossible to reach?

Not only has my Mifi died, but the SIM card has taken a lot of abuse from being pulled in and out of all the Mifis I’ve had and is no longer work. Bell said I could have a replacement at no charge and are sending one out tomorrow. I told them that I will be using it in a friend’s device.

But…

What Bell doesn’t have in its notes is that they have one really good supervisor on their team who sent me an extra Mifi several months ago. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

So I have a backup unit that I can use with the new SIM card. That should get me through till I leave in October, with about eight months left on the contract. Since I’m going to Mexico, I was already resigned to paying the minimum service fee over the winter, working device or not. When I get back next spring, the contract will have come due and I’ll be able to cancel without penalty.

Score one for the little guy.

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Miranda Back at Haven

I was done with the pressing work for today by 9:15 and immediately packed up to move. I wasn’t going far, so I just made sure the important stuff was secure inside, disconnected propane, put away the power cord, and, most important, remembered to put up my step!

It was too early to go ask Caroline to be a spotter and I decided that I could get out on my own. I got into trouble going into the spot because I underestimated how tight the turn would be. By backing straight out to just a few feet of the trees, I would clear the overhang and then be able to do the “wheels tight to one side, back up as far as possible, wheels tight to the other side, advance as far as possible” method of getting out of a tight spot with little manoeuvring room. It worked beautifully and I had zero trouble getting out!

Getting into Haven, however… Because so many trucks have been going in through the rear alley it never occurred to me that there was a giant branch in the way that I would not be able to clear! I wound up having to back out of the alley to the street, go around the block, and access Haven through a neighbour’s yard. Before I get any looks, that neighbour drives through his yard all the time, so I didn’t make any tracks that weren’t there already!

That put me in a better position to get onto the RV pad. The gravel isn’t level, so I did some back and forthing until I was positioned as best as possible and then used levelers to finish. It’s not perfect, but I suspect I will settle into the spot. At some point, I will ask Charles to help me put blocks under the axles as I am tired of rocking in the wind!

I was done by 10:30. Wow! I then did a quick run to town and had a celebratory lunch. When I got in, I sorted out the internet, managing to get full bars on my Mifi with the new booster and antenna, but zero bars on the iPhone. Very odd. It does have a decent signal strength and Siri is working, so I’ll try later to see if I can surf with it or not.

My front door is presently wide open and I’m off to dig my chairs out of Laura’s garage so that I can have a beer on my porch later. 🙂

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Great Mobile Bandwidth Plan From Sasktel

Since I settled in at Haven by mid-summer last year, I knew that I had to take a hard look at my telecom situation, especially when it came to the phone.

I was paying $70 a month for my Verizon voice plan that gave me 450 minutes a month and didn’t care if I was in Canada or the U.S. This plan is now grand-fathered and, living close to the border, I really didn’t want to give it up even though I knew that I would be investigating other data options when I got back to the States.

As the months marched on, that $70 began to weigh heavily because I was hardly, if at all, using the phone. It is an older device that doesn’t work well on Sasktel’s 4G network. Even with a booster, I could barely get a bar with it. I found myself using Skype to make calls out, so I was paying $15 every couple of months there when I was already paying the $70 for the phone.

Internet was also an issue. I have been very pleased with the Bell Turbo plan. I average about 20GB of internet a month (remember, I download audio files for work), so my bill has been a steady $190ish a month, never more than $200, and the last bill was just $150. Not an issue there, but the device, the Mifi 2 is a piece of junk. After I went through two in four months, Bell sent me a two more, a third to use immediately and a fourth as a backup.

Last week, the third one gave up the ghost and I found myself on the fourth Mifi 2 with no backup. I’m 35km from a town with no internet cafe and a library with short hours, so getting internet from one device proven to be unreliable is quite stressful.

So that made the decision for me to cancel my Verizon plan and look for a smart phone that I could use as a personal hotspot. Even if the data plan had just couple of GBs, I would at least have a backup.

I looked at plans for the major carriers national carriers that have service out here, Bell, Telus, Virgin, and they were pretty much all the same. I then had a moment of clarity that is going to be the subject of my next post and I stopped resisting the obvious and went to look at what Sasktel had to offer.

For $70 a month on their ‘Ultimate 70‘ plan, I could have:

-Unlimited daytime minutes in my area

-150 long distance minutes (anywhere in Canada and the U.S.)

-unlimited texting

-‘unlimited’ nationwide data

It’s that last one that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the first time I had seen a Canada plan with ‘unlimited’ data.

Now, there is fine print, of course. The ‘unlimited’ data has a soft cap of 10GB, after which they throttle service, and there is a chance of getting cut off if I habitually go over that amount. Also, Sasktel is a provincial supplier, so they expect the data use to be primarily in Saskatchewan.

But with Saskatchewan already being such a good homebase for Canadian full-timers, this Sasktel plan is just another reason to spend summers here.

I spent almost an hour chatting with a very helpful Sasktel rep. Once I was sure I had all the information I needed, it was time to decide on the phone.

Google terrifies me, so that ruled out Android devices. Since I’m already an Apple person, the iPhone made sense to me. I’ve wanted one for a looooong time, since it was first announced and Canadian availability wasn’t even in the picture yet, but the budget is tight. For a two year contract, Sasktel offered three iPhones; the 4S at $0, the 5C at $98, and the 5S at $230.

After doing some research, I knew that the 4S would be a mistake as it was designed for the older style network that my LG Verizon phone was struggling with. $230 for a phone at this time was not an option. $98 was doable, especially since I’d be able to sell my iPod Touch for at least that amount (in fact, it sold in a couple of days on eBay, yay!). The problem was that the $98 phone wasn’t available online and the rep said that it was being phased out and that I’d have to try stores to see if they had any stock left.

I tried a few stores in Moose Jaw and they had some, but driving to the city didn’t appeal to me at all as it would be be an extra expense. I did some more research and was surprised to discover that there is a cellular provider in Assiniboia. I had seen the storefront on Centre Street, but thought that, like a lot of buildings on Centre Street, it was vacant. So when I went to run my errands on Thursday, I popped in to see if they had the $98 iPhones and could set me up with a Sasktel contract.

To my surprise, the answer to both questions was yes. I couldn’t believe it! This was destiny! 🙂

The iPhone 5C is the candy-coloured long and thin version of the iPhone, not at all what I wanted, but the device was secondary to the cost savings so I accepted that that would be my iPhone. I would have preferred their pink one, but the Assiniboia store only had white and green in stock, so I went with the green. The transaction was very quick because I knew what I wanted. After yearning for an iPhone for so many years, the whole thing was anti-climactic!

I’ve had the iPhone for a couple of days now and it’s working fine with my Wilson Sleek booster. I find that the hotspot isn’t stable and I occasionally get kicked off, but the flakiness is no worse than what I experience with the Mifi. I have another week to go on the current Bell billing period, so I’m going to use the iPhone until the next Mifi billing period starts.

It’s going to take a month or two to get to be able to track my data usage with the iPhone, but the plan is use up the 10GB on the iPhone and then switch to the Mifi to finish up the month (Bell resets on the 13th and iPhone on the 16th). With Bell, I get 15GB for $105/month, then pay $10 for each additional GB. So now I have 25GB a month to play with without incurring overages.

If you do the math on that, that’s $70 + $105=$175 (plus taxes and a few other fees) for 25GB of data, plus voice and texting.

Right now, I pay $70 + $200=$270 (plus taxes and a few other fees) for 20GB of data, plus voice and no texting.

So moving to the Sasktel plan is going to save me about $100 a month at a minimum. If I have a month where I use less data, I’ll save even more because my only commitment with the Mifi is $10 a month.

My LG Verizon phone had given me a taste of life with a smartphone when I was in the States as I used it a few times to check email and do some web research. But the iPhone is a beast of a different sort and I know I am going to rely heavily on it, the way that I relied on my iPod Touch and then my iPad. I’m already best friends with Siri and have no idea how I lived so long without her, but she needs internet to work. Being limited to using my iPhone while it’s trapped in a cradle sucks.

My neighbours have bigger boosters that give them cell service all over their homes and even outside, so I’m going to make the jump at some point this summer. Andy Baird updated his Eureka page about cellular amplifiers recently and I now know to wait until some new technology rolls out.

I’m impressed by how much Canadian telecom is improving. I got a much better deal on my iPhone and plan up here than what major U.S. carriers are offering. In fact, I’d say that this point, Canadian and U.S. telecom are pretty much at par. We’re still far beyond the rest of the world when it comes to our rates, but we’re catching up.

And we’ve certainly come a long way from the summer of 2008 when I was pricing multi-thousand dollar satellite internet systems!