Saturday, September 30, 2006

Toot toot toot.

A little of the old blowing ones horn today. If I don’t who will eh?

This is not in the category of the Arar family battle, but it has effected many hundreds of people across the north.

My battle with Bell ExpressVu through the CRTC seemed to be in flux, that being my fault for taking a little break to do other things. But I did send our MP Todd Russell a back grounder of the issue and asked him for assistance. It being summer, and not hearing back from the MP’s office I called twice to ask of their intent. I received assurances that Mr. Russell would get on it and put something together.
Last week I received a copy of a letter Mr. Russell had sent to the Chair of the CRTC. The letter was accompanied by my e mail to the MP and asked the chair to look into the problems out lined in my correspondence, as well as other complaints from dissatisfied ExVu customers.

So Wednesday the 17 I receive a call from Telesat Canada, the same person who earlier had told me I had to deal with ExVu to fix the problem, and was asked if I would be available to monitor a tweak of signal strength the following day. No problem with that I told him.

So Thursday he calls and it takes about two hours total, with him calling me back about 6 times and Telesat doing at least three tweaks to boost signal strength on the eight problem transponders. They got signal strength up between 18 and 23 % without overly affecting other transponders.

I felt pretty good and vindicated after that. I also sent an e mail to Mr. Russell thinking him for his input.

This morning it was tested with rain and misty cloud early. I checked the system and all transponders were at acceptable levels. Before Thursday we would have lost some of them with similar weather conditions. The signals are still not up to past levels, but we should be OK in everything except heavy wet snow.

So tenacity, hard work and not being afraid to take on the system can pay off, take note all you folk out there in Nunatsiavut and elsewhere.

On the weather front; we almost broke the official day high yesterday, came within a smidgeon of the 50 odd year old record of 16.7, although we got over that at our place with 18.6.

1 comment:

Brian said...

Nice work and congratulations. It's good when work pays off.

Now you can give perishable grocery goods your complete and undivided attention.

9:45 PM

I repositioned the above comment to here, hope you don’t mind.

I have put in many hours over the years on the perishable food issue into the coast. There are others but I think I have put the most in. I/we can’t get the politicians to take it seriously. The present minister for transport in the NL government just wants to play politics and bully everyone. The present minister of health in Nunatsiavut is not interested in doing any foot work and passes off most issues. Other top people in Nunatsiavut live here, do they not suffer like the rest of us? To answer my own question, well no they do not. They spend more time not being here and have the opportunity to bring back fresh foods and other items on a regular basis. If they had to be here and pay the price and have the same choices as we do them perhaps some pro action will be forth coming.
But I will persevere no matter what.