Looking to setup station in South Africa

[Steph]

There is no other option

You could use two-way satellite internet. But it has a rather long round-trip-time.

[Tobi]

But it has a rather long round-trip-time.

Round-trip is not so important for the signals, they have only one trip.

[Steph]

Yes, but I thought he was using the internet also for other things than blitzortung.

ssh for example is painful over satellite

[Jacquesvw]

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.

[rogerpaulthompson]

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 ?

[Jacquesvw]

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.

[Knickohr]

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

[Jacquesvw]

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.

[Knickohr]

Do it !



The major problem is to get the PCBs

Thomas

[rogerpaulthompson]

I got notification today that my hardware has arrived ! I also have more or less a whole weekend available to commence with the build :-)

[rogerpaulthompson]

Build complete and system online

[Jacquesvw]

Fantastic and that was quick

[Knickohr]

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

[Knickohr]

Roger,

what happens with your station ? Station is offline for about 1 day or so

Thomas

[rogerpaulthompson]

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

[Knickohr]

Ahhh, the problem of remote access

OK, one tip, try to automatically reboot station daily, this solves some problems.

Thomas

[rogerpaulthompson]

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

[Knickohr]

Now, second station #1332 is offline

Thomas

[Jacquesvw]

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.

[Knickohr]

You sending a lot of disturbers :

   

Whats this ?  An electric fence ?

Thomas