Networking your observatory or set up via TeamViewer

[Fay]

yes i have Mick

[Rick]

Yes, Phil said you wouldn't be impressed Rick, but I don't think I have any Radio Hams living near me and it's not as if I am running it all the time anyway.

Curiously, it's not actually the amateur frequencies that get messed about most, because the manufacturers work quite hard to prevent their kit from spewing interference into the amateur bands. The things it'll mess with are the broadcast digital radio stations, and the newer faster adapters may also mess with digital TV.

[Mike]

DAB isn't Radio Amateur equipment it is Digital Audio Broadcast. i.e. Digital radio.

[PhilB]

It does seem a little curious that given the lengths that some of us go to to keep signals out of the mains network that noisy devices designed to inject a signal into the mains are allowed to exist. I do wonder about the security of data transmitted by such means. It should be possible to pick up these signals up and down the street, maybe even over a wider area.

[Rick]

that noisy devices designed to inject a signal into the mains are allowed to exist.

Yeah. There's a BBC Research White Paper (pdf) about the interference they produce, and there are plenty of other collections of evidence that show the extent of the problem, but so far none of the regulatory bodies have done anything other than make excuses.

I do wonder about the security of data transmitted by such means. It should be possible to pick up these signals up and down the street, maybe even over a wider area.

If you're on the same phase from the same sub-station then it apparently works quite well for at least a few hundred yards up and down a street, up to a point. If lots of houses on the same phase are all using them then it doesn't work so well. Security is provided only by whatever measures the adapters themselves take when deciding who they'll talk to.

If you have a nice upstairs ring main then someone prepared to do a bit of work can also receive he signals over the air, but that's more likely a few tens of yards.

[Fay]

Carole, i have got my TP-Link plugs.

on the instruction sheet it says they should be plugged directly into the mains not via an extension, which is where it would be up the garden & indoors, although i can change the indoor one.

Are yours plugged in direct?

Fay

[PhilB]

If you're on the same phase from the same sub-station then it apparently works quite well for at least a few hundred yards up and down a street, up to a point.

I don't know if the system has changed, but the arrangement used to be that supplies where taken from the three phase cable in the road on a rotational basis. So house number one gets say red phase, number two green, number three blue and the pattern then repeats. So the red phase and any signal thereon will surface again at house number four, again at house number seven and so on. None of this traffic appears to be encrypted.

A recent conversation that I had with British Gas revealed that they were starting to roll out metering that was fitted with a transponder that could be accessed over the mains distribution network and could be used to check the integrity of the meter and also to obtain consumption figures for account billing. The range was said to be significant, what ever that means. I got the impression that they were aiming to have some sort of data point at the end of most roads,  so I guess that a range of a few hundred yards is probably in the right ball park.

[Carole]

Hi Fay, yes I had the same dilemma and contacted Dion on Astronomy shed who put up the tutorial.  He said it would be OK so long as you don't have a surge protector on the strip.  I have only 1 power socket in the obsy and everything runs off it.  I have plugged the TP Link into an extension and it is fine, I am plugging the indoor one straight into a wall socket.   

Dion thinks they are just covering themselves.  

Carole

[Carole]

Phil has been round and fixed up the UVNC on the desktop (I had it on the old laptop before) so I can now get either Teamviewer or UVNC to the obsy.  

One thing interesting with Team Viewer is you can give the codes to a friend, and they can watch what 's happening on your PC via the internet.  

Apparently there is a view only option which I haven't looked for yet, and even more than one person can watch it, so we could have a shared imaging session, or let learners watch if we wanted to.  Or a shared processing session.



Carole

[Fay]

Thanks Carole. So the TP, plugs into the mains socket, the ethernet cable goes from this to my  broadband box. So what connects the indoor laptop to the TP plug?

[Carole]

Bit confused Fay, isn't the indoor one the one you plug into your broadband box?

This is what I have done.

Indoors: the TP link is plugged into the mains, the provided ethernet cable from this plugs into your router indoors.  (Assuming it's long enough, or you'll have to obtain an longer one).
In the garden: the TP link is plugged into the power socket, and the ethernet cable which is plugged into the TPlink in the garden, plugs into your imaging laptop.  

Once it is all connected up, you need to press the buttons on the bottom of the TPlink for several seconds, first on one and then on the other, I am not sure whether it matters which one is done first.  This makes them talk to each other.

Then connect both computers to the internet and Teamviewer.  Connect indoors to the one in the garden using the password on on the garden one.  This tripped me up too because the password seems to change every time you start it up.  

If you can't connect the one outdoors to the internet, I am not sure what happens then, which is why I am keeping the UVNC up my sleeve which also works via the TP Link.

Hope this helps.

Carole

[Fay]

thanks carole, that clarifies it now. I thought you also had to connect the indoor laptop to it, and could not figure out how.

yes what if the internet connection goes off with the one in the garden, back to square one as it was with UVNC. I thought that the TP-link would bypass all that.

[Carole]

What was happening with your UVNC Fay?
Seems mine was actually OK, my problem seems to have been my dodgy ethernet port on my old indoor laptop (which I didn't realise was dodgy). 
I am now using my desktop indoors which is upstairs on the opposite side of the house, but the cable would have had to have trailed all through the house, so using TPLink avoids that. 

I thought that the TP-link would bypass all that.

TP link avoids a network cable, Teamviewer works through the internet. 

Carole

[Fay]

i keep losing the wireless connection

[Carole]

Assuming UVNC has been connected up OK, you should be able to connect with the TP Link without needing the internet. 

It's only Teamviewer that needs the internet.

I tried to link up my upstairs desktop to UVNC and it connected just momentarily and then dropped out again (this was using the long cable through the house), but when Phil came over he said I needed to use some different settings as I was going through the router.  He's now changed that and it works fine through TPLink. 

As it worked before without internet to my old indoor laptop (Before the ethernet port went on the blink), I am assuming it only needs a local network in the house and not an internet network. 

Hope that makes sense.

Carole