YAY! No more timer, no more dropped letters, menus are beautiful again!

Yes the gearboxes hold the dish VERY securely. Plus, even if some wind or vibration caused some pulses, the MC will ignore them. Remember, the interrupt will fire no matter what, but unless the MC has an output high, to move the dish, it won't count them anywhere. It'll skip by all the if-then's and continue like nothing happened.

I put a button and led on INT pin and a LED on a spare pin then turned it on.
then I added:

LED = 0
pause 500
LED = 1

to the beginning of the interrupt handler. push push, blink blink, but no blackout from the response pin. So interrupt is not working.