Windy As

Being woken by howling wind should have been a warning, but when turning on the kettle first thing in the morning I was greeted by the sight of the Wi-Fi antenna used to pick up GK-2A pointing in very much the wrong direction.

Of course it was still howling with wind and raining, but I wanted to re-point it to see the weather which was causing the weather which had blown it off course for the first time in just short of two months.

I tried re-pointing it in roughly the right direction from memory, but not unsurprisingly this was easier thought of than done.

Instead I connected to the Pi using my phone (ConnectBot) and view the current vit(avg) as I adjusted the direction.

I fairly rapidly had it down to around 60 which is pretty good and seeing zero packet drops, with that being the ideal measure of quality.

So I then did the acid test, which was to see if there were images being created, which it passed.

And there was a big clue as to when it was blown off pointing in the right direction with the last image being received at 04:50am since the last image (plus the processed version) being created just after. Plus getting the first image post re-pointing at 08:10am.

And a zoom into that last image before it was blown off course shows nothing too remarkable.

And by the time I’d written this up, vit(avg) was up to 100, so the wind is obviously still fairly strong in just in the right (wrong?) direction to blow the antenna.

UPDATE – it has been blown off again twice, so might need the wind to settle down a bit and will need to figure out how to avoid rotations…

Now using string to prevent it rotating and this is resulting in a stable vit(avg) with zero packet losses. I also got to see my lowest ever vit(avg) of 19! Hopefully the string doesn’t break, although that would be a good fail safe rather than it blowing the dish over.