I spent the last week upgrading satellite dishes in all the sites. In addition to the district hospital, I also upgraded the remote health clinics (Kirehe, Rukira, Rusumo, Nyarubuye, Mulindi). Emeka, a Nigerian tech working for the Israeli company we are using came out to lead the install.
This is my first experience with satellites and the process should be pretty simple. You first find out where the satellite is in the sky from the ISP. You disconnect the dish from the modem and plug the DVD-LNB into the transmitter. The DVD-LNB is basically a DVD player attached to a screen. It communicates with the transmitter over coax and reports signal strength. You point the dish at those coordinates and adjust elevation and azimuth until you get the best signal possible (about 50% for a 1.8m dish). You then connect the modem back to the transmitter and change the IP settings and tweak with the ISP until you maximize your speeds. Whole thing shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
In actually, it can take forever to get everything working. Finding the location of the satellite takes a fair number of calculations that are easy to get wrong. Adjusting the dish and finding the signal can take up to three weeks if some equipment is bad or the satellite isn’t sending out the signal you expect. The satellite modems are also fickle and without the right firmware you can waste a lot of time.
In our case, if you were also unfortunate enough to show up to a site where the keys to the dish or modem where not around — you’d have to do the upgrade by jumping a fence to get to the dish and use the local WiFi network to configure the modem and hope when you rebooted the modem and router, you had enter the right IP information and still had WiFi.
We also had to install the dish in places like Nyarubuye (means mountain of rock) or Rukira (means city on top of a mountain with a twisty “road” that features a sheer drop on one side and car sized potholes on the other that I had to drive down in the middle of the night with an old Toyota truck…but I’m not bitter).
On the days that we had a driver and we took the Land Cruiser and had to ride in back. The Land Cruiser essentially has bench seating in back, so the two to three hour trips means you are being violently tossed around from one side to the other. Your body has no choice to tense up and it’s an exhausting journey. If the driver isn’t good, expect to puke. Violently.
All in all, things went better than expected. It took two days to get the dishes pointed and the rest of the week was spent optimizing the connections. We are using shared bandwidth on demand and now between the six Rwanda sites and three Malawi sites, we have 1.5Mbps down. I rewarded myself with a well deserved goat kebab.
