GPS and Dish TV

It’s about time I started making the rounds of our sponsors here at GPS ROU Tracking.  It’s always welcome to have sponsors to help pay the freight, but I’m not going to kid anybody … GPS ROI Tracking is strictly a one man, small time operations, mainly an outlet for my curmudgeonly, and I would probably keep it alive and write semi-regularly even without sponsors.

But over the years I’ve found that sponsors and advertisements add to the value of the site for others, as well as me.

I could never write about, much less learn the ins and outs of some of the advertiser offerings that appear here … but, because this is a narrow, technical niche, and I get readers from all over the world, someone may see exactly what they have been looking for, and find what their business needs for a better ROI through an ad.  So thanks to everyone on both sides of the advertising equation.

One of my faithful supporters is not really GPS-related at all (at least at first glance, read on and you may see the connection) an outfit that goes by the name Satellitetvissue.com  … and, as you might guess, they specialize in advertising, reviewing, organizing and de-mystifying the sometimes bewildering world of TVRO (TV Receive Only) satellite offerings that flood the market.

TVRO is ‘tech speak’ for what most people call a home satellite dish … and quite frankly until they cam along I had no idea there were so many different services and offers out there.  If you want satellite TV, you need to take a look.

One of the non-TV services they cover is satellite Internet services.  This is an importnat product for folks in many areas where there is no cable Internet service … a lot of folks are styill making do with dial up when they ought to be getting the full benefit of the Internet by linking via satellite.  The are sisues with satellite Internet, pluses and minuses, as there are with all forms of Internet access, and when you need to hook up via satellite, you need to, bad.  Recommended.

Given, that by my guess, not many people come here looking for Tv satellite dish deals, I wonder why SatelliteTVIssue.com advertises here.  It’s likely they came upon this site by the ‘magic’ of Google … Google’s smart, but very non-tech in some ways … we use the word satellite here a lot because GPS is a satellite based service …and Google doesn’t do all that well at differentiating satellite positioning from satellite navigation from satellite viewing of Katie Couric (Yes, Virginia, people actually do pay money to watch her …)

But I promised you a connection between the two services and in fact I’ll give you two:

• If you sell, service, install or troubleshoot satellite system terminals … of any persuasion, and your fleet is not  monitored by a GPS tracking system, you’re leaving money on the table.  Another supporter here, Rob Donat can tell you a lot more, and prove the dollars and cents of the matter.
• If you install these units you need a GPS unit … even an inexpensive camper/hunter/fisherman entry-level box from Cabella’s or your local sporting goods store.  And you need a resource like this. 

I’ve been involved in dozens of instals where the installation folks (amatuer or professional) had no clue as to their latitude longitude.  You won’t get "un the bird", at least not without alot of time and trouble unless you know.  Sites that just give you city names, without letting you type in your actual lat/long can be worse thna useless … unless you live right in the center of one of those cities.

And commercial vendors in the US tend to send their crews out with look angle tables calculated by the customer’s Zip Code.  Fine, perhaps, in New York City, but in most of the US, a Zip Code can cover alot of terrotory and the hals-baked Zip-derived locatiosn are often dumb. 

Bottom line?  Use GPS and improve your bottom line