1 March 2008
Internet connectivity at the country property
Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic under: Misc .
After moving back to Melbourne from Sydney in late December of 2005, i started to spend my weekends at the family property up in the gorgeous Upper Yarra Valley around 100km NE of Melbourne.
On a nice sized piece of land with mountain views, the headwaters of the Yarra River not to far away and surrounded by the forests of either the Yarra Ranges National Park or the closed of Melbourne Water Catchment, its a great place to wind down after a hectic week in Melbourne.
It has one problem through…the property is far enough from the nearest town and exchange that i can’t get ADSL, cable or even ISDN to the house. My mobile phone has never worked up there either, as the house is pretty close to the base of a mountain which messes with signal reception. Now over the years i have accepted that i wasn’t going to get broadband speed unless i installed some satellite dishes (which i decided not to do as the monthly limits and access costs are ridiculous even after you consider that i could get the initial equipment and installation completely sub-sidised by the Government) and i actually got used to not having that level of conectivity and availability to the outside world…sort of like being on a deserted island with only crappy tv reception and a great mountain pub just down the road ;)
None the less…in eary 2006 I fired up the modem and the old dial-up account (which is how i survived between 1984 and 1991 when i was big on the whole BBS thing and also how i first discovered the internet through apana.org.au), but after having spent the time between 1991 and 2005 riding on the bandwagon of ever increasing internet access speed which comes with living in the city and also with my various internet and technology related job path…the speed of dial-up was close to useless so i rarely ever used it.
Today things changed for the better :)
On Friday i grabbed a UMTS/HSDPA modem that we had at the office (one of our original test units) and an external aeriel with a long cable and took it up to the country property to test it. After lunch today I got the ladder and mounted the aeriel about four metres of the ground halfway up the TV aeriel mast, plugged the aeriel into the modem…and like magic (after a bit of fiddling with gateways and dns and other things)…i finally got broadband’ish speeds.
I’ve just spent the last 3 hours getting my old NetGear WGR614 wireless router to do its thing and now i have wireless access to the wireless modem…brilliant :)
The next step is to get a permanent modem, a higher gain aeriel, a longer aeriel cable and to permanently mount the aeriel at the top of the 8 metre mast.
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