I hust just completed an Online Form with westnet to increase my monthly download limit. With the type of work I have been doing recently I need the extra bandwidth – and I realised it was probably going to be cheaper this way since I decide to accept charges for excess usage rather than having the internet connection slowed down. And still, even with a slightly increased monthly premium, it is cheaper than my old ISP and I get significantly more traffic.

One of the things I have been selling on eBay is some Orbcomm satellite antennas that are just over 1m long. I used them for a consulting project that went nowhere, and now I just have some of them lying there. So they are being sold off on eBay, at somewhat of a loss. Still, they are better being written off bringing in some money, and I really do not need antennas imported from Italy if I need to do a similar project. What I forgot to work out was Australia Posts requirements for sending these. they will not send items more than 105cm long – and in their packets they are 120cm. So they will not be shipped with their original containers… But in a couple of mailing tubes joined together to exactly the right length. And with some luck I will actually meet the postage I stated in the eBay advert.

I have been working on some code on trackers today. Adding a couple of new features, such as sending a position report as soon as someone goes over a certain speed, and averaging the speed over five seconds. But to test all this I needed to get a GPS lock. Normally I put a GPS antenna out the window, and generally have a few outside for this purpose. I plugged one in, and it would not work even after 30 minutes. Mysterfied I traced the cable. I had not plugged in the GPS antenna at all… Just a piece of wire that went nowhere. OOps. Plugging in a real antenna fixed things…

I think I have fixed another bug. Tracking units were mysteriously also sometimes not downloading their entire history for some time if they had been out of range. I have traced this down to a function that pings the server and makes sure it is still connected. Other layers are supposed to pick up if the link is down but they dont always work. So I had this other code which pinged the server. And what was happening was that if another message got sent to the server before the ping reply then the unit would see a problem and soon disconnect and reconnect starting again. Simple fix, but it took a while to diagnose.