Today’s travels brought me to beautiful Afton, Wyoming.  Shortly after I had received the report of the Rock Springs outage I received additional reports that Afton was off the air as well.  Once again, I suspected satellite receiver issues but had no way to positively confirm it without an Internet connection to the site.

The road to Afton from Rock Springs involves a pretty snowy mountain pass…Clearly this part of the state got even more snow than Laramie!

A 7% grade downhill as we crest the mountain pass…

 Made it to the site.  Reid opens the gate.  We’re lucky that the road up the hill has recently been plowed!

The road to the hill…No problems at all making it up to the tower site.

Almost there…

Made it!

Another view of the beautiful Star Valley from the top of the hill. 

Unfortunately the plowing stopped well short of our building…At least it will be much easier to walk this distance through the snow than all the way up the hill!

 

Reid walks through the snow up to the building…It’s still about a foot deep or so.

 

The satellite receiver tells the tale…Out of lock.  No audio.

The LNB at the dish looks OK but it is always possible that it has failed and the receiver is still functional.  We’ll need to do some more checking to be sure…

 

Next stop, a local Radio Shack to pick up a power injector.  It is originally designed to power an antenna amplifier but works just fine to power a satellite LNB.  This device will allow us to power the LNB at the dish independently of the receiver.

Inserting the power injector at a convenient point in the coaxial cable to the dish…

Just to be safe, I disable the LNB power supply on the satellite receiver.  In theory there should not be any damage from leaving it enabled but I would rather not take the chance.

I had not packed our spectrum analyzer (since I did not anticipate a potential issue with the LNB or dish aiming) but I DID happen to have a USB stick that functions as a software defined radio receiver.  This particular combination DOES cover the frequencies I need to look at and shows a very nice spectrum analyzer and “waterfall” display of the spectrum.  It looks like there is no signal here.  The noise floor is rapidly jumping up and down which indicates the LNB is probably indeed dead.  This is the first time I had used this particular setup to troubleshoot a satellite downlink.  Fortunately we had bought a spare LNB.  Out to the dish to swap it… 

Reid pulls the feed horn from the old LNB and installs it on the replacement.

Installing the replacement…I was able to get it relatively close to where it had previously been set.

One replacement LNB installed…Back inside to check the signal…

   

We have signal!  Our carrier is the big bump in the middle.  Two different laptops running different software confirm that we should be back in business.

 

Success!  The satellite receiver is locked to our signal and we once again have audio.

Reid is the guy I have to thank and/or blame for the software defined radio idea.  Here he poses while I capture some incriminating evidence…I mean…another photo…

We carved quite a path trudging to and from the truck to the building but now it’s time to hit the road again.