Internet access and phone-mast signals
As the weather is deciding to turn a little bit cooler / cloudier and not represent standing in the kitchen in-front of a fan-assisted oven with the door open, I decided that I would like to spend 1/2 a week (3-nights) working away from home, somewhere nice, somewhere near some water, like a lake, just somewhere pleasant that doesn't involve me driving the motorhome for 6hours. As I've become a bit of a GIS mapping geek the past few months I thought I'd take a look at someplace local, not too far away that had an Adult camp site (get your mind out of the gutter - I just don't like kids, just like I don't like Gen Z's, same thing, if I can avoid any contact or not be in their vicinity, I will take every measure - they annoy me - I am sure the feeling is mutual).
With that in mind, I stumbled over this lovely place, right next to Chew Valley lake.
Okay, so why don't I just book in for a few nights and just bugger off there and keep myself to myself. Well, trust me - I am going to! However. As we live in the modern-age, there are a few more items on the "must have to live" criteria list beyond the basics such as water & food. Internet access being one of them.
As I will still be working, (living the dream doesn't mean you're always on holiday you know!), I will still need to attend webex conference calls, still need to check work email, slack channel stuff and generally "be available for the odd phone call".
And this is where the head-scratching comes into place. Whilst everyone would like to think that "everywhere has as signal, so what's your problem?". I'm not in central London. shock. horror. So, 3/4/(5G) signals are not a given, but a luxury - reminds of of the early 2000 days when we used to talk about GSM/GPRS signals being "occasionally connected luxuries", which is why the start-up I worked for at the time (AvantGo) had such a nice market-share and kicked Blackberry in the berries.
How do I go about checking to see if I can get a decent phone signal there?
Well, the absolute truth is I did a reconnaissance run, yes, I actually drove for 2hours in total (1-hour each way) and drove around the area and to the place I was going to stay and checked the signal with my mobile phone - it was "interesting". Moving around every so slightly the signal would go from non-existent to 1-bar, back to nothing, then to 2-bars, then 1-bar, then nothing.... hmmm... I ended up driving around the whole lake and concluded this was not a very good area for coverage!
Upon getting home, I did the geeky thing. I then "got on the inter-webs" and decided to see what information I could find, and that is where the geekiness really started to kick-in, there is a lot of data that can accessed / checked - it's s shame it is not all in one place, but I'll see about making something myself later on that can be part of my own personal custom motorhome app (yes, I'm making a motorhome specific mobile/tablet app using Flutter and I must say, it's kinda awesome - follow up article to come).
I found this site: https://www.signalchecker.co.uk/
This is where it lists out ALL of the companies and provides links to their [Network Checker] web pages - I'll show each of the important one's below.
I then wondered if there was a website that could show me the actual phone masts in the region and then "see" what coverage they actually have - if you've not seen this type of data before or seen how it is represented, then take a look below - it is actually very geekily fascinating.
I then went to this site: https://www.cellmapper.net/map
You will need to remove / stop your AdBlocker to use this website - small price to pay for a free site!
Zooming in to the select mast coverage zone, I can see that the mast above Chew Stoke (possibly on top of a hill?) does stretch down to the region of interest. As you can see, it's a bit random looking for coverage.
Now, let's zoom out a bit and check some other masts - now THAT is interesting - look at the coverage from that one that is actually further out than expected:
So, what have we learnt here?
Well....we have learnt that there is not going to be a lot of bandwidth available - am likely to be "sharing" the bandwidth over a couple of masts with a LOT of other people - however, as I'm not going to be there at the weekend, the volume of phone devices should be a lot less. We'll see.
What I would really like to have, is the ability to pull all of this data together and be able to query it for a location, postcode or reverse geo-lookup using coordinates, to then present this data into a single layer to show me the coverage map, informing me when I'm likely to go out of signal.
This website shows promise: https://opencellid.org/#zoom=16&lat=51.33673&lon=-2.59955
Interestingly the data shown here doesn't quite tally up with the cellmapper mast data - hmmm.... well, both are "community driven", so not sure how up to date the data really is.
I did a bit of research and you "can" download the Opencellid data, which is about 900GB! But, you need to sign-up for an API key and then you can choose to download the data - I wonder if you can filter it, I expect you can, to reduce that data - if it comes in a .CSV format (or similar) then it can then go into a database of some sort and can then be queried and the presented as a layer on the map view.
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I appreciate the viewpoint that 5G will solve all of the worlds problems as it will give blindingly fast speeds and coverage and be amazing - we'll see if the sales & marketing match up to the reality.... the MaxView and the SIM card I have in the motorhome are "5G ready", so if I drive into a location that offers it, it'll get used.
EXTRA: Apparently the usage of these phone masts can also be a cheap/cheat mechanism instead of using GPS on a phone device (that uses quite a lot of battery juice!), the phone mast data does include the coordinates and with a simple bit of code, you can triage a very close location of the phone and can use that to track the phone instead of using GPS satellites... that'll be another future project
Right, now is the time to go and prepare the motorhome for usage tomorrow afternoon.
UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE
okay, so it turns out the people who fitted the MaxView ROAM device connected it to the 12v power supply - which in itself is not a problem, however, they spliced into the wiring for the cabin lights - again, not a problem, however (again), it means that I have to have the front & back cabin lights on. What's the problem with that? Well.. they are both on dimmer switches... and if you dim them down, they draw less current and then the WiFi router doesn't get enough juice and powers off, d'oh! It also means that I have to have ALL the lights on in the motorhome in order to use the WiFi - time to wake up the missus at 8am!
I'll look at rewiring it later on. For now though let's take a look at some results.
Well, first of all, the mobile phones using normal SIM access, is as to be expected.... naff. 1/2 a bar, 1 bar, no bars, attempt to do anything & "no connection".
The MaxView ROAM with BroadbandGo "super user" bundle has no such problem! In fact, as I type I am using 1 laptop, 1 mobile phone and the missus is using 1 mobile phone & 1 tablet all connected to the WiFi and not noticing any issues at all - it's like being at home. I do have a webex conference call in 30 minutes; so that will be a true test.
So what does the WiFi router tell me about the connectivity?
All in all, though, after one evening and one mornings usage, all seems to be working well and there is little difference to working from the motorhome or from working from home.... except it's a lot brighter with all the lights on!
UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE
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Out of pure curiosity, I signed up for a free account to lumen5.com and [imported] this very article to see what it would make of it. I'll do a separate article on this later on, as I think this type of technology may have some "legs" in the future as those Gen Z's are losing the ability to read or concentrate for longer than 10minutes and want to "see" everything shown to them via VIDEO and AUDIO, usually streamed to their phone. sigh. anyway, this is what lumen5.com made of this article:
https://lumen5.com/user/tonypigram/phone-masts-ur9yv/
Now, I admit, there are 2 options, "AI summary of text" and "use all the text", I selected the 2nd option for the results above. The "AI summary" was interesting, but needs more work.
I was watching the above and I then fell into the mental trap - I thought to myself, maybe I should change the content of the article to allow the "AI summary" to make a better output, perhaps shorten it a bit, perhaps change some of the wording..... and that's when the flashing red light in my head kicked off - that is what is going to happen in the very near future, writers or creators will start to write in a certain ways to keep the algorithms happy and it'll all start to become very same-eee. Anyway, content for another article.
UPDATE: I thought I would try out a different 'text to video' service. InVideo.io. I signed up for a free account, used a template and entered this page as a URL. It was really simple / easy to then highlight the text to add to "scenes" that become the "slides". The output becomes auto-generated text with images that are related to the text - I modified some of the images, using the "scraped images", but still minimal effort involved and then the video was created:
https://invideo.io/preview?id=Nzc1MjM1NjI5OTU1MTk4NzM1MTkzNDE3MDI5Nzg5NDUwOTIzMjM5
I would say that this was a more involved process - I certainly would not have used this for total automation, it would have taken more effort; but as with all things, adding effort added a bit more to it.
Right, I def. will stop playing around now!
vv
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