It really is beautiful out here… Right now it is 9:34PM, and things are quiet. There are insects from all directions that can be heard as well as some other animals. I actually saw my first cane toad for this trip a few minutes ago. Above us is what appears to be an iron ore outcrop, and below a lake. And it is so quiet, but at the same time so noisy with nature.

Let me explain a bit about broadband GPRS, and conditons here. Basically I am presently in a valley. And there should be no GSM or GPRS coverage. Should be. But on the hill there is what we call a passive repeater. This is a device that is in essence just a couple of antennas, one on each side of a mountain, and what is heard on one side is just transferred to the other side. It is no more than two antennas conected to each other with some CoAx. And without any amplifiers, things may not work well at all.

GSM seems to work OK around here… Sometimes. Not inside metal sheds, and sometimes not inside, but it does seem to work. This is of course thans to the repeater. But it seems that this repeater does not like GPRS. Or GPRS does not like it… Does it matter which? GPRS does not like to work, and I suspect that it is something to do with timing rather than signal strength. Or noise… Regardless, GPRS just does not seem to work. Then again neither does my GSM. If I come out here again I will bring an old cellphone and add an antenna to it… A big one!

It is now 6:30 Sydney time, and I cannot understand why Queensland does not do daylight saving. Seems dumb to me, when it is getting light so early, but gets dark about 6:30pm. What a waste. What a waste. When I turned the PC off last night I turned the light off and looked outside. Things were so dark. But after a few seconds my eyes started to adust and there were so many stars. Quite amazing, really. Looks fantastic.

And it is so quiet. It took me a while to realise that the occasional noise was not an F111 in the distance but actually a car in the distance (but slightly closer than the plane would have been 🙂

Oh, and I have just looked on a map. I think I have located the problem with GPRS. I think I am too far from a base station. I think the passive repeater is working, but the distance is the issue. We are more than 35km from it (just) and the protocol breaks over 35km… And just does not work.