sande.ca

One of the problems that having technology in remote locations is maintaining some degree of reliability.  If you've spent any time looking at the webcam images either on this site, sande.ca, or on my other site, hollowaybar.com, you will have probably figured out that I (along with a some family members and some long-time friends) have a number of webcams scattered throughout Northern BC and the Yukon.  We utilize a number of internet connectivity options - for example, the Terrace locations involve both ADSL and cable-modem connections as well as a satellite feed to get the camera images to the network.

One of the webcam upload locations is at Lakelse Lake, about a 20 minute drive from Terrace.  Lakelse Lake is a popular spot for recreational properties and the lake is lined with many summer cabins.  There are also quite a few people who choose to live at Lakelse throughout the year, although with the long Northern BC winters and heavy snowfall in the Coast Mountains make life difficult.

Being located out of town also limits the availability of high-speed internet connections and there are essentially two choices.  If you have a phone, you can still use dial-up to connect to the Internet, although the slow speeds result in an inconvenient and less-than-ideal web experience, particularly  when trying to access multimedia content like YouTube videos or streaming audio.  I don't have telephone service connected at the lake house (although it is available there), so decided a year ago to install a satellite system to provide an always-on broadband Internet connection.  This Xplornet system runs at the lowest speed (to save a bit of money!) and provides downloads of 512 kbits and uploads of 128 kbits.

While not as fast as my home cable-modem connection, this speed does provide for reasonable performance for surfing the web and basic services like Skype VOIP service.

I spend as much time as I can at the lake cabin during my summer time off and very much appreciate having Internet available to me as most of my hobbies revolve one way or another around the Internet - whether it's creating content for one of my web sites, monitoring our growing webcam network, or just catching up on the latest news with a cup of coffee in the morning.

I've also installed a webcam at the lake in one of our "custom-built" enclosures, designed by me on a napkin but skilfully constructed by my father who is a master woodworker.

We started buying webcams a couple of years back to broadcast images from the Holloway Bar Placer Mine located in the McDame Creek valley in the remote Cassiar mountains.  All of our cameras are made by TrendNet and are comprised of two main models.  Our earliest cameras were the TV-IP100W - a plain-jane camera that simply takes a picture of whatever it is pointed at and then ftp's it up to our web site.  We constructed enclosures for these cameras out of sewer-pipe parts with a glass circle in one end to server as "window".  Later we switched to the TV-IP400W cameras which also include remote control abilities - so these cameras can be tilted and panned to view the surroundings.

We don't make the control capabilities available to Internet users because of bandwidth constraints, but do publish the pictures on the web site every couple of minutes.  We also had to come up with another method of protecting the cameras from the elements as the "sewer pipe" method doesn't work for these cameras.  So, after a bit of searching on the Internet, I discovered a company on the east coast that makes acrylic domes at an affordable price (about $60 for a tinted dome) so ordered a bunch...

So, now we had everything we needed for a remote camera.  Last summer things went fine - the camera worked well, but occasionally things would go wrong and the camera would lock up.  Usually I (or someone else) was around here so could cycle the power on the camera if it happened to freeze.  But as the fall approached and we didn't come to the lake as often, a locked-up camera meant that no images were going to the web site (nor were we able to access and control the camera to check on things) until someone made the drive to the lake to reboot things.