Internet improvements and a messed up schedule

[Thursday: 4.0 miles, today: ~ 6 miles]

On Wednesday we had some fellows show up from our wireless internet provider.

We happen to have two internet services.  This wireless one we have had since shortly after we moved here.  It uses a radio system with antenna pointed at a water tower about three miles away.  Later on we also added AT&T U-Verse (like DSL) which comes in via the phone line.

Anyway, these were the wireless guys.  They changed out our antenna for one with higher gain, and they moved it higher up on the radio tower we have.  They also made it a bit faster and put in a neighborhood node so that our neighbors point to our setup and it gets relayed on to the water tower.   (So, if my house power goes out, the neighbors will lose their internet.)

This was all good.

It caused me a bit of trouble though.  When the guy climbed the tower I turned off the WMFH-LP radio transmitter.  It was off for 3+ hours.  But the biggest trouble was that when I started it up again I think I loaded the wrong programming schedule.  I say that because, today I was listening and noticed that we were running the Friday schedule and not the Saturday schedule!  But today is Saturday.  So I was one day off.

Since our Saturday and Sunday are repeats of the prior week’s books, I decided to continue on with the Friday schedule and skip either Saturday or Sunday instead.

The schedules in the computer have a line at the end that fires off the next day.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to really check which day is next, it just increments the day.  So if I start the Jan 1st schedule it will chain to the Jan 2nd schedule even if today is really Jan 3rd, if you see what I mean.  So an error on my part is perpetually in the system until I fix it.

Anyway, I have a plan for fixing it.  But I’m hoping I will do a better job next time and not make a multi-day mistake like that.

Besides the faster wireless internet, we also got to exercise our two-ISP router.  It seamlessly put us on AT&T while the wireless was being worked on.  So that was nice.