Hitch mounted satellite dish - strange, but true!!!

[Mike]

Hi all,
I had a thread in the General section on here about my experience with TV on
the road, and my "trek" from the stone age to something approaching the age of
enlightenment. Sort of. This is the final chapter(I hope), and a link to the latest
upgrade from OTA to mobile home satellite, for travels to those places where OTA
isn't really possible because you're too far away. From everything.

It all started back in the late summer of 2008, when I decided that the old analog 13"
TV that Roadtrek included in my '02 just wasn't going to cut it with the USA about
to cut over to full digital OTA. So last spring, I went through the conversion to an
external ATSC tuner. Painful, but I was digitally compliant and glad about it.
However, after a subsequent roadtrip, I realized that the TV itself was pretty lame,
so we upgraded last summer to a newer Sharp LCD flat screen that only draws 29W.
Perfect for RVs with low power generation capacity. So another tragedy averted.
Thinking that would be it, the epitomy of road-TV, we took another lengthy roadtrip
and quickly realized, it doesn't matter how good the TV is if there's nothing to watch
on it, for any reason (but mostly, because there's no OTA signal in the places we like
to visit).
So the most recent project was figuring out how to take it (home satellite) with us.
This link is to the thread with the whole story. For the satellite portion, scroll to the
bottom of the posts/replies.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1283&start=15
Enjoy.

[Mike]

I'm not the only one with hitch mounted satellite.
We pulled through the John C. Stennis rest area on I-10 late one night looking for a bathroom,
and noted a Sprinter based RV with a small dish mounted to a rear trailer hitch. Looked like a
classic tripod setup modified to fit the hitch. I did note the owner had just run the cable from
the dish to the external cable jack on the outside of the driver's side of the van. My choice was
to run it underneath the driver's side bed seat cushion and then out under the rear door through
the weather stripping.
Looked functional though.
Never did get a chance to try our new dish. Weather and logistics prevented a good test opportunity.