"the boy who harnessed the wind"

 

did you guys see this on the jon stewart show?
a guy built an electric wind "turbine" (out of sticks) in africa.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba  

 

On Fri, 9 Oct 2009 14:19:04 -0500, "William Wixon"


I really enjoyed that interview. Great story about discovering Google
after the fact. Although I bet it wasn't so funny at the time. Cool
guy, and his English is better than our resident edotir.  :-)

BTW, I saw that interview immediately after watching an episode of
Peep Show, the one with Jez's soliloquy about the motivation of HAL
the boiler. My gawd, that was so funny it bordered on painful. Season
6, episode 2 if anyone's interested.

Wayne

 




Wow!  Whose radio did you use?  What freq band? How did you get the height?
(convenient mountain?)

Vaughn

 



I'm in a similar situation -- miles from the grid and have been trying to
come up with a way to get some high speed internets

Love to get some practical advice from someone who's actually done it.

cheers

-zachary

 

On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:06:08 -0400, "vaughn"


Our DSL costs something like $50 per month. We were pretty fortunate
to become our local Telco's experimental location for this unit. They
have a bunch of customers on an old BETRS system, plus some other
various scattered radio customers like us. A couple of times over the
years they needed somebody to test out hardware they were considering
purchasing in bulk. The setup we have now came from these guys
http://www.thinroute.com/products.html#anchor2 .

It can do 10 meg and accommodates 4 POTS lines. But the far end, which
is in a rural subdivision, only has 6 meg available at residential
rates. The antenna there is mounted at about 12' on the roof of the
CO. Radio and VOIP powered from the Telco's batteries, and the DSL
"modem" powered from a standard UPS.  Zero copper on our installation
compared to people who live in the subdivision, some of whom are miles
from the CO.

The antenna at our end is mounted on our garage roof, which is
something like 1000' higher. Ideal location. Our end is mounted in
outdoor pole box, and designed to be powered entirely by AC. It has a
couple of batteries, charger, and an inverter to power the VOIP and
the router. I mounted it indoors, and bypassed the inverter. It uses
about 20W now.

If you have line of sight to somewhere with good broadband, and were
willing to shop around, you could probably do one of these setups for
about $2k complete, but it would have to be different hardware than
ours. Here's our radio
http://www.eionwireless.com/products/vip11024.html , and this is the
VOIP unit
http://www.voiplink.com/MP_104_FXO_p/audiocodes-mp-104-fxs.htm . That
stuff would be pricey, but I think that there are newer VOIP units
that are only about $50 each, and Ethernet radios that are about $500
each.

Wayne