The VK2DJG blog

Living in “the bush” (rural Australia), we make do without facilities expected as givens by most townies. We don’t have reticulated water (we collect water from the roof), no sewer connection (we have a septic tank), no garbage collection (I make a monthly trip to the recycling depot and landfill transfer station). We do have power (albeit installed at no small cost with our very own 11 kV line and 16 kVA transformer).

We don’t have a copper-based telephone connection (we have three 32 kbit/s radio channels via a microwave link to the microwave hub 19 kms distant). The latter gives a decent 46 kbit/s dialup modem connection - but that’s it. We could pay for a kilometre or so of copper to connect the the telco copper (they’d have to lay 6 km themselves). Even so, the nearest exchange doesn’t do ISDN or ADSL.

The only reasonable way of achieving a high-speed connection to the ‘net is with a 2-way satellite service. And today, after weighing the pros and cons for about 12 months, I ordered such a service. The one I’ve gone for has 512 kbit/s downlink / 64 kbit/s uplink. I’ve also ordered a public IP address (to give VPN access to work from home, and access to my home server from work or elsewhere).

I expect to see this installed within the next 4 weeks.

I just hope that there’s no interference into my ham radio receivers - then I’d be sorry!

I’ll keep you posted.