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+--- Thread: Looking to setup station in South Africa (/showthread.php?tid=978)
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Steph - 2015-04-28
(2015-04-28, 19:40)Knickohr Wrote: There is no other option
You could use two-way satellite internet. But it has a rather long round-trip-time.
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Tobi - 2015-04-28
(2015-04-28, 20:36)Steph Wrote: But it has a rather long round-trip-time.
Round-trip is not so important for the signals, they have only one trip.
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Steph - 2015-04-28
Yes, but I thought he was using the internet also for other things than blitzortung.
ssh for example is painful over satellite
Looking to setup station in South Africa - Jacquesvw - 2015-04-29
I have satellite internet at home, but it's so noisy here that I couldn't test the station and had to move to a remote location and now use a 3G gateway instead.
Yesterday the 3G gateway ran out of its data cap and I had to buy more. I lowered the gains significantly so that less bandwidth is used because data is expensive in Africa.
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - rogerpaulthompson - 2015-04-29
In many ways, this is still deepest, darkest, Africa with expensive, intermittent connectivity. :-) Even us guys on adsl have continuous intermittent loss of connection.
Out of interest Jacques, what sort of bandwidth has your station uploaded since it came online 16.04 ?
Looking to setup station in South Africa - Jacquesvw - 2015-04-29
(2015-04-29, 06:13)rogerpaulthompson Wrote: In many ways, this is still deepest, darkest, Africa with expensive, intermittent connectivity. :-) Even us guys on adsl have continuous intermittent loss of connection.
Out of interest Jacques, what sort of bandwidth has your station uploaded since it came online 16.04 ?
If it's not Eskom "load-shedding" it's our internet, what a mess this place has become. I was struggling too much with broken connections when I still had 3G at home, so I decided to get Satellite and it's super reliable. Only drawback is the high latency, 800ms to 1200ms sometimes.
My station hasn't been running continuously from the 16th, but in the one and a half days it were running it used about 1Gb and over a month that will become very pricy as a 20Gb bundle goes for R999 I believe. However, now that I've lowered the gains it's much better and it's still detecting strikes in Southern Africa and that is all the range I wanted anyway. It's doing no good detecting European strikes, because there are plenty of stations anyway.
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-04-29
We don't need to detect European strikes. We only have to detect these valuable African strikes !
Yes Jacques, you lower the sensitivity of your station. This is good. Until there are not more stations in Africa, we must live with these heavy strikes in Africa, which are detected from European stations too. If I look at my signals, yours too, I see we are detecting a lot of strikes, but they're going to /dev/null
Hope, 2 more station in Southern Africa will become online as soon as possible. So maybe the developers are available to build an own region for Africa. I think, if this happens and there are at least 4 station in Africa, we will detect much more strikes as in Europe. Africa, specially the equatorial belt is the most lightning area all over the world.
Yes, data traffic (upload) for BO is about 500MB per day !
OK, fixed my "internet connection problem". I build an software watchdog, which pings every 10 minutes the IP address of Google. If ping is unsuccessful, I reboot the WiMax modem. Works since yesterday, hope it will perform well.
Thomas
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Jacquesvw - 2015-04-29
Glad you fixed the internet connection issue, Thomas.
I have a holiday home down at the coast, about 860km south of station 1332 and I would like to put a station there as well. All I need is another system.
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-04-29
Do it !
The major problem is to get the PCBs
Thomas
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - rogerpaulthompson - 2015-06-04
I got notification today that my hardware has arrived ! I also have more or less a whole weekend available to commence with the build :-)
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - rogerpaulthompson - 2015-06-06
Build complete and system online
Looking to setup station in South Africa - Jacquesvw - 2015-06-06
Fantastic and that was quick
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-06-06
Jeahhh !
3rd station in southern Africa up and running
One more and we have a "little" network
Station needs some finetuning, there are a lot of disturbers, but anyway, it works.
Thomas
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-06-08
Roger,
what happens with your station ? Station is offline for about 1 day or so
Thomas
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - rogerpaulthompson - 2015-06-08
(2015-06-08, 16:47)Knickohr Wrote: Roger,
what happens with your station ? Station is offline for about 1 day or so
Thomas
Hi Thomas !
Correct, it seems I cannot reach the controller remotely at the moment :-(
Sadly I am away from home for two more days commissioning a PV solar plant before I will be back at home and be able to reboot it.
I will however make an attempt to access it indirectly via another server of mine ... will update you if I have success.
Roger
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-06-08
Ahhh, the problem of remote access
OK, one tip, try to automatically reboot station daily, this solves some problems.
Thomas
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - rogerpaulthompson - 2015-06-18
Hi Guys,
Ok, I am up and running.
I have resolved ups power, adsl and remote access related matters now. I initially had my station gain turned way down for about a week or so due to large interferences from nearby electric security fence. However that did not appear to be working too well resulting in very little contribution from my station.
I have currently set my system to fully automatic mode for now to see how things go ...
Roger
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-06-18
Now, second station #1332 is offline
Thomas
Looking to setup station in South Africa - Jacquesvw - 2015-06-18
(2015-06-18, 13:34)Knickohr Wrote: Now, second station #1332 is offline
Thomas
It probably used all its data cap for the month... I'll check tomorrow. It's pretty bandwidth hungry and costing me allot.
RE: Looking to setup station in South Africa - Knickohr - 2015-06-19
You sending a lot of disturbers :
Whats this ? An electric fence ?
Thomas