CSU Telescope Link for the Transit of Venus |
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Written by Administrator
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 As you may be aware, Bathurst Wireless was involved with the CSU remote telescope
to webcast the transit of Venus. Everything went quite well yesterday
for our side of things, providing the link required for the event. Due
to a little bit of cloud cover the transit of Venus was not visable for
as long as hoped. Flak and I were out at the telescope for the duration
of the webcast, we also provided some of our bush mechanic skills
during the webcast to keep things happening. Whilst the view was
totally blocked by cloud we helped rig up a digital camera to provide a
feed of what we could see. Flak gave the world with a quick guest
appearance :). Matt and David will be providing us a copy of the video
captured which we will stream on our internal network. There will also
be an editted copy of the stream available on the CSU Remote Telescope
site - I'm not going to promise that Flak will star in that one :D
Just
for the wireless nuts out there... The link was roughly 12Km with 2 x
Minitar 802.11B access points in point to point mode. A aluminium
slotted waveguide at the observatory end and a little hills dish at the
other. The minitar at the observatory end was powered by a gel cel 12V
battery which suited the fact that it was in the middle of a sheep
paddock. Streaming was done on a Windows 2003 Server box in the back of
Matt's car capturing the images from the camera attached to the
telescope. It then pushed the stream to a windows media server based
back at CSU over the wireless link we provided. We are hoping to get
some pics of the event up on the page shortly - especially ones showing
the excellent portable mast Flak made. Unfortunately there is no pics
of my attempt at the other end - although Matt could testify my
workmanship and skill with the use of ocky straps :)
Thanks
again to all of the Bathurst Wireless crew who contributed to make this
happen. It has been good exposure for the group, plus an excellent
chance for us to put the "community" into community wireless network.
Hopefully with the plug David gave us on Prime News and some on the
local radio stations there will be some more interest in our network.
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