A Busy Couple of Nights
The point
Our church is hosting a Beth Moore simulcast on August 1-2 and that feed comes in via satellite. We had the dish installed a few months ago, yet I wasn’t there when they did it, so was not sure to what extent it was done. All I knew was in the sound booth, there is a new receiver that was connected to a flat screen, no input at all.
So, last Tuesday, Daniel, Mike and I made our way to the roof to find the dish and to find out if the cable was run inside. Donna stayed on the ground, possibly to call for help if something tragic happened. When we got up there, we found the dish, mounted on top of an A/C unit, face down. Apparently, the wind had blown it out of position.
We pulled it back up to close to the position we thought it should be in, then chased the cable into the roof. Our building is an old Wal-Mart building so the roof is big and flat, so we tried to get our bearings for where we needed to be. I paced off 38 steps from the front to where the cable went inside.
So, down we went and I paced off from inside and ended up a little off. All 3 of us took turns looking in the ceiling but could not find where it was. Daniel offered to head back up and with the help of our cell phones, he was able to move it and we found it.
We then chased it through the ceiling to the soundbooth. Interesting. Digging through all the wires coming up, we found a loose coax cable and plugged it in.
By now it was dark, so our work was done, for now.
Round 2
Last night, we came back ready to aim the dish and ensure we could receive the broadcast. It was Daniel, Donna and I this week, so Donna covered home base and Daniel and I went up. This time, we took the video camera up and it took us as long to set up for it as it did to actually get our work done. I brought in my backup laptop, which has a battery that lasts longer than 2 minutes, and I was streaming pretty quickly.
When Daniel got there, he thought of the new laptops we bought that are not being used yet, so he went and got those. We set one up for Donna to monitor us as she directed us how to aim the dish and we hooked the camera to the other one and headed up the ladder.
At first we had no signal, no matter where I aimed the dish. Then I noticed the cable going into the dish didn’t look quite right and quickly discovered it wasn’t attached. Apparently, when the dish slammed forward in the wind, it broke the end of the coax. At one point, I was hold the wire coming out of the coax between my fingers and we were getting some kind of signal.
Great! My job now is to be the satellite.
Once I stuck it back in and did some more aiming, we had a signal that was about 95% strong. Very nice. Donna did a great job getting us in the right position for the best picture. Both of us were on our speaker phones. Also, we were able to stream most of it, from the roof.
Another team member arrives
About this time, Rachel arrived and came up, so that was fun. We spent some time just playing around on the roof, it’s a big roof. We lost our wi-fi signal, so Daniel started shooting straight video that we were going to stick on YouTube, but in the end, something bad happened and the file was corrupt.
I dared Rachel to jump off the roof, onto a lower roof and she considered it, but she didn’t. I’m secretly glad. Back on the ground, we were back in the range of decent wi-fi, so we were streaming again. At some point, Mike (@downtownmike, his blog) and Greg (@gregsimmons, his blog) joined in the fun, chatting on the live stream and it was a bizarre experience to me. Daniel and I were talking to them and they were typing back to us and to each other.
Mike is actually a member of the FCC Dream Team aka Tech Team but he apparently had other priorities last night. I was glad he was able to participate remotely. Greg and I have connected recently and seem to have a lot in common in how we serve our own church and we are both trying to master streaming.
He gave us a quick tip on a setting to change which seemed to clear up our audio issues. Thank you Greg! I have to say that I think Greg is an honorary member of the Dream Team and now has access to all rights and privileges granted to Dream Team members.
Knowing Mike’s attraction to server rooms and knowing he hadn’t seen it in awhile, we took a walk to the server room. Then we toured a lot of the rest of the church, showing Greg our setup.
It was a very fun time! Someone suggested that Daniel and I need to do our own show on the web, we’ll have to see about that. That may be a stretch, but I do want to stream nearly everything we do around the church.
Next event: equipment install, this Saturday.
Tags: FCCdreamTeam, FCCtechteam, ReachingCarthage
