Interesting story.........
Could the more tech-savvy hazard a guess at what sort of device he might plug the dongle into and how he converts the signal to get it on to fibre optic cable?
Could this be similar to Mi-Fi which is becoming more common overseas?
At a guess something along the lines of a Rasberry Pi, 4G dongle plus a dedicated hardware media converter at each end eg
I wonder how well it will work in the short days of midwinter or with snow on the PV array. Curious to know how he managed to lay the fibre optic cable so that it will be safe from ploughing or hedge flailers.
MiFi (or tethering your mobile phone) is quite common in the UK now too. I get a marginally better 3G Three mobile speed than I do by wired ADSL.
Data charges sting a little but are becoming comparable with wired out in the sticks since you don't get any real choice of carrier here.
There are other microwave based local services but they require strict line of sight to the mast and no trees in the way.
I have by sheer coincidence ordered a high gain antenna and an adaptor for my MiFi today and will report back on how it goes. In theory the extra signal could take the link up from 5Mbps to 20Mbps or so.
No chance of a 4G signal anywhere near me. Only Three offer 3G up here. The rest are 0G (no service), 2G or 2.5G if you are lucky.
easy for a farmer - mole/trencch it in 3 feet down ;-)
any sort of conduit will do - plastic pipe etc
In message , JimG writes
Haven't we just had this conversation, or am I in a parallel universe?
Raspberry Pi would tax my non-existant programming skills so do you reckon something like this might be the go?
On 20/08/2015 17:37, Martin Brown wrote: ...
On the section shown on TV he ran it along a wire fence.
You are in a serial universe, it repeats what happens in the real one, most of the time.
Yes, we'll never know.
Correct answer, as I have been reminded in the petrol prices thread :-)
Fine, but can we get back to the queries in the OP?
An ethernet router, with a USB port for the 4G dongle, then either a standalone media converter from copper to fibre, or a switch that supports SFPs with a suitable fibre SFP, probably running something like openWRT on the router, if you're really lucky a dedicated SBC like something from Mikrotik may even have an SFP slot onboard the router, then you'd have to run their RouterOS.
e.g.
Just give it power, plug in the USB 4G dongle, the fibre SFP and configure the routerOS ...
In article , Tim Streater scribeth thus
It said somewhere that it was 1300 metres in length. If I were doing that I'd use something like 1 mm SWA and buried it and then used something like 110 volts with the appropriate power transformers at the end thus doing away with the daft solar powered units that will be piss poor in the winter and then would have used 5.8 GHz to link it back to the farm....
FWIW YMMV of course......
Once you have the network presentation on ethernet, then transceivers for optical links are easy. (a pair of network switches with special function ports and an fibre transceiver etc)
There are routers available COTS that will take a 3/4G dongle and use that for a WAN interface.
I did similar with a roof mounted 4G flat panel aerial, feeding a dongle plugged into the USB port of my Vigor 2830 router.
4G speeds are good here - but alas not economic for the amount of data I need.Kind off - more like tethering a phone via a cable...
With a MiFi stuck up a pipe you can use a WiFi access point/router in bridge/client mode to convert to ethernet. Getting power probably just needs some PoE down a mains cable to get that sort of range safely as its only 48V. I have a poe terminator that gives 6/9/12V out on one of my bits of kit that cost all of ~£9 from china. The injector is in the switch.
The wall wart for it is 24 V @ 0.8 A = 20 W ish. Apart from the slight issue of 24 V that's a heck of a lot of energy to provide from solar PV.
See previous post with rough energy budget calculations, based on 5 W for a TP-Link MR2030 and 5W for a media convertor. IIRC that 10 W required a 200 W 12 V panel and even then it might not provide enough energy in the winter.
Daily Wail journalists lack of understanding. The mast does look weak and wind loading will probably do for it in the first winter storm.
It'll probably last a couple of years if cows don't chew it first.
I expect the Daily Wail has got the boxes mislabelled.
He would have to be a complete idiot to put the battery box at the top when height invariably gains you extra signal. Odd that the antenna is not weatherproof or on a thin extender. It looks very much like its in the style of Heath Robinson and/or "the range extender that Jack built".
What puzzles me is why he needed to do a 1km run of any cable unless local topography prevents him from getting line of sight on the 4G mast from his home a decent aerial right at the top of the house would be a far simpler and more elegant solution.
Ooh look. Another genius who thinks that just because a poster uses a Mail link, all that is reported there is unique to the Mail:
Andy, that's bril!. I'll give it a go and hopefully will be up and running before too long.
Thanks
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