So the new elevation motor for our F2 satellite dish finally arrived. Many thanks to Solar Mike for letting us use his address. But of course the package did not include any of the insulated Scotch Locks I was promised it would. Big surprise, it was hard enough getting a tracking number from MotoSat.

“If you’re near a Lowe’s or home Depot…” the MotoSat tech started to tell me where I could get some Scotch Locks. I cut him off with a laugh, “Yeah, right!” A couple standard insulated wire connectors I had would have to do the trick.

After a day of brief flash floods, and too many days of sharing our MiFi wireless internet connection, I was able to quickly and easily replace the motor set – thus completing yet another repair on our dish. All seemed well as the dish successfully completed its calibration. Then upon search, it returned a motor stall error, azimuth this time. Big Surprise.

Sending the dish up again resulted in success. A fluke? Perhaps. But something didn’t seem right. When the dish went down, it’s azimuth was way off. While the D3 controller reported 0º azimuth, the dish was clearly out of alignment. After a couple more tests we could could not reproduce the error. So we are back online with good ol’ satellite 91 West – telling ourselves again that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Deep down we are hoping we don’t have another motor going bad, however, because MotoSat informed us of an interesting clause in their warranty agreement. All replacement parts are only covered under warranty from the original system purchase date. So the replacement motors – yes, motors plural – we have installed, are only covered until our original warranty is up. A date which is quickly approaching. As I said, big surprise.