Friday November 4th 2016

It was a beautiful warm humid day in the low 80s until evening. A cold front is approaching from the north complete with thunderstorms. It is only forecast to be in the low 70s tomorrow.

My obsession for the day was getting my satellite TV to work. I’m parked in a field with a line of trees between the camp sites to provide some shade. Unfortunately the trees are also interfering with my roof top satellite dish finding its target. So today, I moved the RV back 3 feet to what looked like an opening in the tree cover and sent the dish up again in search mode. When that didn’t work, I took another walk around the campground to check the orientation of other satellite dishes. I also downloaded an app for my phone to assist in finding the satellite.

Site A8 between trees. The satellite needs to point a little to the right of the camera angle.

I moved the RV back another few feet for another try. I still didn’t have any success with getting TV, but I also had a failure with my automatic leveling jacks. I should be able to push one button on the dashboard and get the four jacks to automatically deploy and stabilize the rig on a level plan. This time one jack didn’t deploy and I couldn’t get the rig to level automatically with the jacks down. I spent an hour or so trying various things to fix the issue without success.

This is by no means a catastrophic failure, I just need to level manually until I get it fixed. I’ve dug out the manual and will be searching the internet for ideas. What it did do was distract my attention from finding the satellite. I will try again to get the satellite aligned tomorrow. Until then I will have to live with the limited over the air TV reception. I get CBS and Fox along with a bunch of sub-channels.

I also went for a drive to check out the area to the west of the campground and Interstate 95. This is an area that I haven’t been in during my previous tours of the area. Other than a few new home developments, I didn’t find anything remarkable. I never even got out of the car. I just drove in a big circle for about an hour and a half.

The campground has filled up tonight. Some of the new arrivals are clearly snowbirds returning to Florida for the winter. Other new residents seem to be here for the weekend. This park is next door to the local Flea Market and an event field that has the St. Augustine Pirate Gathering going on this weekend. These may be the attraction for some of the new arrivals. I’ll probably check out the fleas tomorrow.