The MacAlba

Monthly rainfall tallies for the past 7 years (in millimetres), as at 20 km east of Armidale, NSW.

      Jan   Feb   Mar   Apr   May   Jun   Jul   Aug   Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec   Total
2002  50.0  80.0  78.7   3.5   4.3  21.9  10.3  58.2  26.7  25.0  83.2  75.6  517.4
2003  51.6 144.5  52.7 108.7  39.1  31.8  18.9  23.0   5.7  91.3  55.9  71.1  694.3
2004 192.1  77.8  65.2  22.4   5.4  20.4  43.3  49.6  45.9 111.2  69.0 133.8  836.0
2005  92.9  66.3  16.2  13.2  18.8  82.6  20.9  13.4  87.1  60.2 154.3  98.7  724.6
2006 109.5 115.2 110.2  22.5   3.6  45.8  46.4  30.8  44.8  29.8 133.6  43.8  735.0
2007  98.1 137.1  95.4  43.6  21.7  39.9   8.7 105.4  13.8  95.7 102.8 127.7  889.9
2008 133.6 203.0   3.8  68.9  10.9  60.4  25.8  35.0  54.5  57.1        (YTD) 653.0

The 135 year average for Armidale (in millimetres) is:

Avg  104.5  87.1  65.0  45.9  44.4  56.9  49.2  48.4  51.6  67.8  80.4  89.2  790.1

Given that much of New South Wales has been drought declared for much of this year, we’re doing rather well in the rainfall tally stakes - thanks mainly to summer storms at the beginning of the year. March was rather slim, though, at 3.8 mm (0.15 inches) which contrasted hugely with the previous month, February, at 203.0 mm (8 inches) of rain.

It’s now been a month since moving from 2-way satellite “broadband” service to a wireless broadband network connection.

Since then an external UHF antenna has been installed to get a better signal from the 3G base station. The signal strength has increased from “low” to “low to medium”. It’s not the magnitude of signal gain that I was looking for, but, given the amount of gum tree foliage that the signal has to bore through, it’s better than nothing.

The antenna was installed by professional riggers sub-contracted to the broadband carrier; it sits extremely solidly on the roof. Given that the Telstra 3G wireless broadband terminates on the same or nearby tower to where our telephone-over-microwave service sits, I got the compass out and took a bearing. The microwave antenna is sited about 150 metres south of the house and has a clear line-of-sight to its base station. The UHF wireless broadband antenna was about 20 degrees too far to the south; I swung it around but, surprisingly, it made little difference - the quantity of foliage is being blamed for this.

The peak download speed to date has now been 2800 kbit/s with a peak upload speed of 1100 kbit/s. Compared to the 512k/128k satellite service, I’ve got nothing to complain about (so far).

I live in a rural location. I have no copper telecommunications cable to the house; in fact I’d have to install a kilometre of cable to get to my property boundary, and then Telstra, the local carrier, would have to lay about 7 km of cable to connect me to the local telephone exchange. But then, the local exchange doesn’t have ADSL or ISDN!

My telephone service is delivered by a voice-over-microwave radio link.

For the past couple of years my internet connectivity has been delivered by 2-way satellite. While I can’t complain (OK, I can think of lots to complain about), it was better than a dialup modem - just. While I could live with a maximum 512 kbit/s downlink speed, the latency injected due to the huge distance the packets had to travel was a major pain in the neck.

Just recently, Telstra, the same local carrier, finally dropped the tariffs on its 3G wireless broadband service. For $129 (which, while expensive, is cheaper than the 2-way satellite), I have managed to get a peak downlink speed of 2600 kbit/s (2.6 Mbit/s) and a latency to my place of work that’s now 100 ms instead of 1700 ms.

I can now access the internet just like most of the rest of the people I know.

Oh yes, and while my monthly quota has now “jumped” from 5 GBytes to 10 Gbytes, I still feel like a poor cousin to those using Comcast in the USA who now have to live within a monthly 250 Gbyte quota. The poor cherubs.

Arghhh! I’ve just heard a news-reader on the ABC Evening News (the Australian ABC, that is) tell us that somebody was making their “first debut” in a cricket team. This, I suppose, is a precursor to their second debut?

Rumour has it that we’ll see the iPhone in Australia in June. No carrier has been selected yet. I can only hope it’ll be Telstra and 3G (a purely selfish hope - we don’t get any other high speed mobile phone service in my part of the country).

Also rumoured is that the iPhone and iPod Touch will see an update in June that brings us 802.1x wireless authentication (which means that at long last these devices will work on enterprise campuses).

336.6 mm (13.25 inches) of rain across January and February; just 3.8 mm (0.15 inches) of rain in March. So much for La Niña.