On Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:20:22 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Also, U-bolts won't work. You need something like these

Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the advice. You're a wonderful local resource!

I picked up a 10' length of 1" (ID) EMT conduit today (they don't have
any shorter lengths). I'll cut it about ten inches long, and push it in
about four inches and drill a crosswise hole in the mounting to bolt the
pipe into the J arm.

I might not even bolt it into the J arm if it feels sturdy.

Then I'll lag bolt (screw) it into the edge of the wood roof beams, which
should work. The trick is that they're forty feet up in the air (due to
the hillside being very steep at the fault line). I 'was' going to use
the balcony but this rocketdish is huuuuge!

Exede (Wild Blue), which uses Ka band and spot beams
seems to be less disgusting than the others.

Up here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, we'd ditch everything for cable; but
it's just not in the cards yet (even though we're practically in Silicon
Valley - you'd think we'd be wired!).

While nobody would even think of HugesNet (Ku band), a few neighbors have
started their two-year contract with Viasat Exede (Ka band). It's FAST,
about 12 to 18 Mbps down. Much slower up. But you just can't change the
latencies of 700ms to almost a second!

Even the guys on the two-year Viasat contracts are adding WiFi dishes so
that they have a backup line-of-sight system. The WISPs out here are all
good guys. They let me, for example, keep my dish pointing to them as an
emergency backup, just in case my other WISP goes down (which is frequent
with the winds & power outages around here). We all have backup
generators and the WISPS have battery backup - but it's for naught when
the antenna blows down.

I've mounted a few radio antenna but this new Rocketdish antenna & Rocket
M2 radio is the BIGGEST HEAVIEST I've ever mounted - so it's more of a
mechanical problem than the planar and smaller parabolic antennas I've
had in the past.

The biggest problem now is the 40-foot drop should I fall off the ladder!