Dishin' It

The "Demon Hauler" - that is,my 1934 Ford 1-1/2 ton truck - has carried a variety of stuff over the years. Not the least of which are dish antennas, better known as satellite dishes for their reception of TV/video signals sent down from geostationary satellites. My brother's business, KLM Electronics pioneered the first consumer-oriented satellite reception systems, largely because of an on-going interest my brother and his partners had in satellite communications both for commercial and ham radio purposes. The photo below shows half a of a bolt-together dish about 16 feet in diameter. KLM did not manufacture this dish which was probably purchased by KLM for ham radio and experimentation purposes. The scene is the parking lot of the KLM plant in Morgan Hill, California. My brother, Mick (or Mike to ham radio operators) is standing on the hub of the dish talking to Leland _____ (the  "L" of the KLM partners). I don't remember if the dish is coming or going (its possible it came from the Stanford Research Institute where Mick worked at one time in their radio astronomy facility), but my truck is carrying it. The photo was taken by me and is likely from the mid-1970s.

Flash forward to 2015. Some forty years have passed. I am retired and living in the mountains above Mariposa with wife Melina. A few days ago, on a Facebook "buy, sell, free" site called "SWAP Mariposa," I noticed a satellite dish for sale ($50).

Now for some time I've been scheming on how to protect our 2500 gallon water storage tank from the summer sun (I hate warm tap water), and months ago a satellite dish came to mind as a kind of giant umbrella to suspend over it. And since that time I had been planning to (someday) put a wanted ad on SWAP Mariposa for an old satellite dish. Years ago, many folks up here had them installed because no cable TV was available and only a few areas were able to receive the two or three channels of terrestrial TV from Fresno (using conventional TV antennas). The big dishes intercepted the private commercial satellite feeds used by networks and cable TV operators. That window of opportunity closed after a few years when they started encrypting their satellite feed signals. That left the homeowner with a lot of channels showing of nothing but scrambled pictures. Now up here, folks are more prone to put stuff up than take it down, so driving around these days you can still see the big dishes dotting the landscape.

Anyway, in a short time, the SWAP Mariposa dish was marked down to $20 and I bit. This morning we took a drive in the very same Demon Hauling truck and rambled down Darrah Road to pick it. It turned out that this particular dish was made for commercial communication purposes, and very well built - a single piece of mesh aluminum pressed to the dish shape. The owner had bought it at a sale in Fresno and had planned to use it as a gazebo cover. But the project petered out somewhere along the line and he decided to sell it. Well, we got it home and Melina took the photo below. I am trying to mimic my brother's pose in the old black and white photo, and I am actually holding that same photograph in  my hand. The dish, of course is significantly smaller. A bit of irony: here it is forty years later and (unlike me) the truck is in better shape than it was in the 1970s...