Yokine

Yay, the service upgrade has finally happened.

After spending too much time looking for a provider who would upgrade my service to a 1Mbit connection and having to deal with the government changing the funding regime again, I have found a new satellite internet provider, DragNET.

In the back-end, it's still an Optus B3 service using Gilat hardware, but I've now actually decommissioned my SkyBlaster 360e which has been keeping me online since we started our journey (albeit the third actual modem, first one replaced because a firmware upgrade in Dunsborough, the second one was replaced in Mount Pleasant after a storm hit us in Graham's Creek.)

The new modem - which I've had since April 2006 - sitting in a box - is a SkyEdge modem. It gives me connectivity to the same satellite, that is Optus B3 - though I could have opted for D1, I stayed with B3 to keep VoIP connectivity.

So, now with a new service I have a 1Mbit download and a 256Kbit upload with 5Gb of data for the same cost as my previous service. VoIP is actually working and I'm a happy camper.

Yokine

Setting up in a back yard where you can park the van a few meters from the site is always handy, and so it was for this installation.

I've initiated an upgrade to a SkyEdge platform, and we'll see how well that performs. It may also turn out to be on a different satellite, Optus D1, rather than Optus B3.

VoIP is coming soon...

Kalgoorlie

Well for the first time in four years, I'm currently online via ADSL. That isn't expected to be for long, but the dish was going to be in the way for Australia day celebrations, so concessions had to be made :-)

Nollamara

Setup here last time was simple, now it's a doddle.

As a means to keep the kit all cool, I put a picnic table above the boxes and the temperature in them appeared to drop dramatically.

I have not yet actually inserted a thermometer into the box with the modem, but will do so soon.

Mount Hawthorn

Arriving late at this site the home owners were keen to see the dish in action. So with a little assistance, the Van was reversed into the driveway and the contraption bolted together.

The tripod didn't quite assemble as simply as usual because I'd left the feet attached in an attempt to simplify the install further. I'll likely need to revisit that.

The electronics boxes were getting quite hot in Kalgoorlie, so I've been investigating some means to keep the boxes cool. Currently the boxes are stored in the shade and I've been investigating umbrellas, a safari roof, peltier devices, white and chrome paint, fans, attachment to the mount, but none of those ideas actually capture what I really think would get the thing done.

Kalgoorlie

The installation here is pretty straightforward. The dish is a one-person job, the tripod started the process, the 1.2m dish, which was installed onto the tri-pod for the second time - first time in Perth last month, is now looking normal - albeit small.

I've hung the electronics off the mount, putting them into the shade of the dish, because the angle of the dish is much lower, the shade is smaller.

I experimented with a wireless direct connection between my computer and the dish, but for some reason I cannot make the connection stay up for more than 15 seconds at a time, it then disconnects and reconnects, making for a painful experience.

I'm getting conflicting reports on my Mbit connection, so I'll be following that up. I've got the hardware, have had that since about April, but the account behind the scenes is taking some doing.

VoIP will have to wait just a little longer, because my current Gilat SkyBlaster 360e is not supported and I've not yet upgraded my account to a Gilat SkyEdge.

Nollamara

Setting up in the back yard involved lugging the dish through the garden gate, but that was about the extent of the exercise.

With a whole yard to choose from, set-up took an hour, now we're finally getting to the point where we have a mobile installation.

Wundowie

After four years of lugging a 1.8m (well, 2.0m) dish around the country, I finally got around to buying a smaller set-up. The hardware is almost identical, the biggest difference is that the transmitter is now 2 Watt, instead of 1 Watt.

Whilst driving through Broken Hill, on the trip from Millmerran to Perth, I finally had a spare moment to drill some holes into the bull bar and line those up with holes in the mounting pole.

I hadn't yet attempted to use the mount, but Richard was keen to see my set-up, because all he'd seen to date was photos.

So, if it weren't for the lost cable, it would have taken less than 30 minutes to set-up, from start to finish.

That really means that we now have a truly mobile kit.

You cannot see the black electronics boxes, but I've left the red steel behind in Millmerran and changed over to water proof Pelican cases. Not sure how we'll go with the heat, but from a water/moisture perspective, this is all good.

Australian Camp Oven Festival

Every two years, the Australian Camp Oven Festival is held in Millmerran, Qld. In 2006, Fran was responsible for running the office and I offered to provide the festival with Internet connectivity during the week long event.

Arrival at the show grounds was at 6:00am and by 7:00am I was on my way home with a dish all tuned and ready to go. This was a true test of the mobile nature of our new dish and it worked to perfection.

The festival was a great success and many visitors from around the world came to look at and taste genuine Australian camp oven tucker.

I played a minor role as one of the folks sitting on a quad directing campers to their sites and reuniting long lost friends.

A good time was had by all.

Millmerran

Three setups, and by the end of June, four, all in the same town. First off at a Caravan Park for a bit followed by a previous location, and now for five months with an expected interruption at the end of June in a back yard.

Had some fun and games with IP addresses changing. VoIP stopped working - Onno's fault - uhm, actually, no, not Onno's fault, - uhm, equipment fault - uhm, no routing issue - uh, does it work now - woops?

Took delivery of four SkyEdge kits, one for me with a 2 Watt BUC, all with 1.2m dishes. We'll bolt three to roof-tops at clients, the fourth stays home and soon I'll be able to bolt it to my mount. It's expected to be joined at the end of June by a sister kit, which will give us three modems, three satellite Internet dishes and one TV receive dish, all in for an adventure in the bush. More when it gets confirmed.

Millmerran

Three setups, and by the end of June, four, all in the same town. First off at a Caravan Park for a bit followed by a previous location, and now for five months with an expected interruption at the end of June in a back yard.

Had some fun and games with IP addresses changing. VoIP stopped working - Onno's fault - uhm, actually, no, not Onno's fault, - uhm, equipment fault - uhm, no routing issue - uh, does it work now - woops?

Took delivery of four SkyEdge kits, one for me with a 2 Watt BUC, all with 1.2m dishes. We'll bolt three to roof-tops at clients, the fourth stays home and soon I'll be able to bolt it to my mount. It's expected to be joined at the end of June by a sister kit, which will give us three modems, three satellite Internet dishes and one TV receive dish, all in for an adventure in the bush. More when it gets confirmed.

Millmerran

Three setups, and by the end of June, four, all in the same town. First off at a Caravan Park for a bit followed by a previous location, and now for five months with an expected interruption at the end of June in a back yard.

Had some fun and games with IP addresses changing. VoIP stopped working - Onno's fault - uhm, actually, no, not Onno's fault, - uhm, equipment fault - uhm, no routing issue - uh, does it work now - woops?

Took delivery of four SkyEdge kits, one for me with a 2 Watt BUC, all with 1.2m dishes. We'll bolt three to roof-tops at clients, the fourth stays home and soon I'll be able to bolt it to my mount. It's expected to be joined at the end of June by a sister kit, which will give us three modems, three satellite Internet dishes and one TV receive dish, all in for an adventure in the bush. More when it gets confirmed.

Millmerran

Three setups, and by the end of June, four, all in the same town. First off at a Caravan Park for a bit followed by a previous location, and now for five months with an expected interruption at the end of June in a back yard.

Had some fun and games with IP addresses changing. VoIP stopped working - Onno's fault - uhm, actually, no, not Onno's fault, - uhm, equipment fault - uhm, no routing issue - uh, does it work now - woops?

Took delivery of four SkyEdge kits, one for me with a 2 Watt BUC, all with 1.2m dishes. We'll bolt three to roof-tops at clients, the fourth stays home and soon I'll be able to bolt it to my mount. It's expected to be joined at the end of June by a sister kit, which will give us three modems, three satellite Internet dishes and one TV receive dish, all in for an adventure in the bush. More when it gets confirmed.

Mount Pleasant

The modem arrived and the mount got built and the modem got plugged in and it didn't work.

The old modem got plugged in and it sort of worked, but the BOC sent me logs showing lots of reboots. So limping along we're waiting for the stuff to be sorted out and the paper work to be completed and all to be resolved and life to go back to "the day before the storm hit".

Meanwhile, Google Maps released a world-wide view of their BETA service and I started playing with the software. A whole lot of hacks had appeared, almost over night, that showed off many and varied ways that Google Maps could be used on your own web-site. With a little tweaking I came up with a quick and dirty hack.

About 48 hours after I made my first hacked up version, Google announced the Google Maps API which allows you to make official Google Maps on your site. I signed up, did the work made a nice little map and have spent the past four days banging my head against a wall trying to give it the same functionality as I already had, but using the official API. This involves me relearning JavaScript, learning XML and XSLT all meaningful subjects, just not really all that exciting when all you want to do is show a map, but you get that :)

VoIP is coming, a bigger transmitter should allow for a smaller dish, the World Solar Challenge, 2005 is nearing, there's a project with one of my colleagues in Alaska in the wind, I'm writing some nifty code to sit as a pipe between irmp3 and mpg321 to make the play list on our mp3 player no-longer repeat itself ad-nauseum and I've got cattle to feed, tractors to drive, dogs to pat and fish to treat with WheatBix meal. Frances is off picking olives after her long running transcription gig for the Australians at War Film (http://www.australiansatwarfilmarchive.gov.au/) Archive finally got completed.

Graham's Creek

This is getting to be pretty straight forward, soon I'll be wanting to buy a smaller dish so I won't have to lug so much weight from the back of the van, but you get that.

VoIP isn't quite there yet. I've been playing with making the call settle, but at the moment it still takes around 30 seconds before both sides can hear each other and that simply just won't do. I've also been playing a little with Bluetooth and getting my Nokia 6310i to become part of my VoIP network. I can make my VoIP system detect an incoming GSM call and I can make a one-way outgoing call, eg. they can hear me, but I cannot yet hear them.

I invested in a high-gain GSM/CDMA dual band antenna because while VoIP isn't yet working we're currently on the fringes of Optus' GSM coverage. I briefly played with putting my phone in the van and talking to it over Bluetooth, but the hands-free kit doesn't like that and the phone gets completely confused.

And then the storm hit...

There was a little cold cell around Brisbane which caused hailstones to pile up to a meter high in some places. This being the (sub-)tropics and all, this was a regular occurrence - not. Two hours north of Brisbane, were we are, the hail also visited, but a larger problem was rain, lots and lots of rain in a very short time. It filled the dam, it filled the paddocks, the driveway and the electronics box. Fortunately the 240V side stayed dry, but the sensitive side, the electronics were not so lucky. It appears as if the hail damaged the water proofing, which then opened the way to allow water to drip in from the top and drip past the circuit boards to pool in the bottom. The next morning I turned on the equipment only to have the modem not respond.

Open up the box, lots of water.

After tipping out the water and drying the electronics for a few hours and warming the whole lot in the sun, I dared to switch it on. All was just fine and dandy. I hooked it all back up and proceeded to go back to work. I started composing an email to Gilat about their hardware and how it continued to amaze me that it keeps working regardless of how it gets treated, saltwater air, heat and now rain, only to find that the modem would go away for a little while every now and then. This happens on occasion when satellite operations does some work, but because of the water I figured I'd better give them a call. Suffice to say that the problem wasn't at their end.

During my call to the BOC the modem gave up. It refused to see the satellite and kept doing a self-test. After some lengthy phone calls to various departments and my insurance company - electronics insurance is worth every cent. Expensive hobby, satellite equipment.

Leeton

Unloading was never this simple.

Putting the dish together in its new home after a short drive from Moss Vale to Leeton proved to be completely trivial. The actual tuning took less than five minutes and the dish was up and running without any problems at all.

The wireless gear is acting up a little, so I'll likely spend a little time playing with that to see what is ailing it, because getting a wireless link over 20m should not pose any problem at all, seeing that we had many more metres and walls between the stations in Dunsborough, where it just worked fine.

During our stay here I also want to get the final bits of VoIP stuff working properly and get the whole thing running as our primary phone connection. If it all works as expected, I can even get a calling card and include that into the phone system and make cheap calls over the PSTN network if VoIP connectivity isn't available to that location. We'll see how it goes.

Moss Vale

After driving from Millmerran to Moss Vale via Perth (over 8000km) where all manner of changes were made to the electronics. I've not been happy with the comms box since we removed it from the back of the dish and in Perth we changed the way it fits together. Instead of having the two halves side-by-side, they are now back-to-back.

We sealed the two, the power and the electronics box, together and had to remove the connector to the wireless gear because it was located in the back of the power box. In doing that we decided to remove the external wireless gear, containing two base stations and a hub, and make it all integrated into the box.

Now we have two external wireless connectors, a better connector for the video repeater and easy access to the hub if we need to. We also brought along an old 85cm Foxtel dish, with some switching gear so we can point another dish to another location if we need to.

In re-organising the electronics box we found out that you cannot simply de-solder the RF unit off a Humax 5410Z because it won't boot afterwards. At this stage we didn't know if it had failed in transit, or not. Turns out it was happy when we gave it back the RF unit - which had been badly rusted due to salt water air in Dunsborough.

The plan was to setup in Perth, but a small yard and a big tree put an end to that, but it made us determined to reduce the size of the mount even further. For those who have been following this, we now are down from 26 bolts and 7 beams to 9 bolts and 3 beams and the observant will notice that this mount looks suspiciously like the travel mount we built during the Solar Challenge 2003.

Arriving in Moss Vale, the building of the mount took 20 minutes, the installation and alignment of the dish another 40 minutes (because there was a big roof in the way) and we were up and running.

The Bureau of Meteorology threw a Severe Thunderstorm warning with Large Hailstones at us and we decided after discussion with the BOC and the BOM, that it would be prudent to stow the dish, so we stored it in the Iveco, waited for a storm that never came and built it again in little time the next day.

The dish had a baby.

While in Moss Vale, I used some spare time to install some more satellite gear allowing the baby dish, which was kindly donated to us, to partake in the adventures and supply us with an additional Free To Air television feed for those days that there isn't anything good on the 'net.

I've also managed to get VoIP to work across the satellite link and after some fine-tuning, we may be on a winner there. The two CISCO ATA 186 telephone adapters are plugged into the network and each talks to my workstation which is running a copy of Asterisk. The Asterisk software in turn uses IAX2 to talk to Perth so we can talk to the world. I expect that soon we'll have some other VoIP connectivity which will allow people to phone us for the cost of a local call, where ever we are.

Millmerran

Setup in this location was started late in the afternoon and I'd forgotten how quick it gets dark by the time you get this far North. Fortunately I was ably assisted by the local home-owner who in a previous life was well acquainted with nuts and bolts. The whole frame was together in a matter of 30 minutes.

We waited until the next day to put the dish in place and the electronics now have a better spot with the feeder cables on the inside, going back up the centre beam like they used to. Alignment was simple and our cross-poll check with the BOC was great.

I'm not happy with the water proofing of the current setup, and the tarpaulin is stopping an airflow across the heat-sinks, but with overnight temperatures at 0°C, I suspect that cooking the electronics is not likely to be an issue. I do worry about the direct sun, but the temps only come up to 18° in the day, so direct sunlight is not nearly as severe as experienced in Crossing Falls and the rest of the top-end.

I need to replace one of the feeder cables which looks like it got pinched in transit and I'm trying to determine if it would be worth the effort to install the wireless gear inside the electronics boxes, or if outside will continue to provide the best solution.

I'm still looking for a nicer way to attach the boxes to the frame and suspect that some measuring and drilling may come to pass in the next few months.

Bishop's Creek

Installing the frame was achieved in under an hour and placing the dish on the mount was done in no time flat with the help of some locals. Our electronics solution still hadn't found its way to a point where I could say that I was happy, so I spent some time playing with some ideas I'd had on the road.

Instead of attaching them to the post or the dish, I placed them on the cross beam and with a ratchet tie, tied them to the beam. The location was a little clumsy because the feeder cables were going around the outside and were quite tight, but an improvement was found in Millmerran.

We were getting no signal and it was getting dark, when I noticed that I wasn't going past a tree like I thought, but straight through it. Moving the frame back a metre solved the problem and we were live 15 minutes later.

Packing up was simple with the new location for the beams against the firewall in the van and the electronics box behind the rear wheel. I'm not sure about it's location for any accidents or dings, but I suspect we'll have other problems then if that was ever the case. I'm still looking for a better spot.

Beaconsfield Upper

Our initial scout of this location had filled me with some trepidation. The owner wouldn't hear of defeat, but they'd be in South America when I needed to be on-line, so their level of concern was not quite the same as mine. Basically there were large trees between us and the satellite, but some gaps did exist and some planning was in order.

I improved the method used to construct the frame, this time bolting the three shorts together whilst it was on the ground, then attaching the centre beam and post. I did need to move the whole frame a few meters sideways to clear a tree after set-up, but apart from that, the whole thing is becoming routine.

The electronics boxes were mounted prior to the dish install, which required some fancy jiggling later on and an improvement was made at Bishop's Creek. We again used the dainty tarp to protect the electronics and left the dish to the elements. I made a concession by covering the feed horn with a rubbish bag.

Clean-up was swift and simple. The dish without the electronics boxes was much easier to handle for the two of us and it looks like it may stay separate from now on. Of course everything is lighter once you've lifted 160kg between two of you, now it's only 100kg :-)