On 1/6/2012 5:13 PM, Chuck Banshee wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:53:04 -0800, wrote:
Good to hear the results. All too frequently people just disappear and
we never find out how it went and learn from it.

Thanks for noticing.

Truth be stated, I am on a lot of forums and I post relatively often to
these two NNTP newsgroups (using various nyms for privacy purposes,
usually one per topic). I always try to give back as much or more than
what is given to me to be a good USENET netizen.

People like you and Jeff have helped me MANY times - which I greatly
appreciate. I hope that the record will help many others after us.

The one major flaw in that strategy is that the search engines for nntp
news are vastly inferior to those of the web. For example, when I look up
my old threads (which could be 15 years old and which were initially
archived on dejanews), I often can't even find what I know exists (mostly
using google group searches).

In fact, I often have to resort to web searches to find all my DIYs
compiled with people's help. This works only because some forum sites
tend to include nntp news 'as if' they were people posting directly to
their sites (probably to increase their perceived user counts).

Anyway, this thread will be useful to others - as long as they can find
it in the future! (Including me the next time I need to wire up the
house!)

Have you done any performance testing to see what kind of speeds you're
getting?

I've been doing daily speedtest.net reports.

The speeds initially were almost twice what I was paying for as shown
he
36ms ping, 3.82 Mbps download, 2.72 Mbps upload
http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/...mg/7293085.png

However, my WISP has since dropped them down greatly due to what he
called 'traffic shaping'& what I call throttling because I'm only paying
the $50 for 2 Mbps he's offering as his base plan.

He's actually throttled me to LESS than 2 Mbps ... so I have to document
that and let him know so he can 'reshape' the traffic shaping.

Is it typical for people to have to ask the WISP to reshape the
throttling?

Did you put a lightning/surge protector on the line?

No. As Jeff noted already, we rarely get electrical storms out here in
the Santa Cruz mountains. It even makes the news when there is
lighting ... with people reporting "I saw a lighting bolt in Soda
Springs" or "We even heard lightning over in Scotts Valley", etc.

Now, if I had lived in Florida ...

For whatever reason, the flats of the south bay seems to get all the
electrical storm activity. The bay area itself tends to have few
lightning storms, and like I said, most are in the flats of San Jose.
Not that this makes any sense to me. Everywhere else I've been, the
mountains get hit.

If the WISP hired Jeff, I would have let them do it. Often professional
installation is done by people who can't get real jobs. For fun, go into
youtube and search for bad cable installation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9wSGi4aFG8

Regarding conduit versus galvanized pipe, you did the right thing.
Conduit is meant to be bent. Note there was some guy on craigslist that
was trying to sell a 20ft long 3 inch galvanized pipe for months. It was
gone by the time I saw your post.

It had occurred to me that maybe a metal flange and anchor bolts might
have been better than filling the hole. However I couldn't find any
really wide flanges on the internet for moderate sized pipe. You've
probably seen galvanized pipe used for railings and such, but nothing as
heavy duty as you are trying to do. Also, any time you can get away
without using guy wires is a good thing.

I don't think those antennas with reflectors wear particularly well. I'd
stick with what you have. I've done much longer distances with a 16dB
panel, and just to a wifi router in a house. Point to point is way easier.

While I've intercepted WISP feeds out in the boonies (encrypted of
course...drat), I've never inquired how they are set up. Does the WISP
provider have a high gain omni at a central site, or do they put in a
directional antenna for each customer?