His vision began in 2002. He began to put together a system that consists of an HF radio (high frequency) attached to a modem, attached to a pc running server software that would fetch pop email from a main corporate lan server and compress it enough to send over the hf radio waves to the client in the bush, who had a radio a modem and a laptop all connected to a car battery which was charged daily by solar panels.
In order to get it done, he had to have antenna towers built, a parcel of land cleared, and had to solve many problems, not the least of which was, where to put it and HOW to put it.
The final result is all this equipment sitting in a steel shipping container in the middle of nowhere. Telephones ran a line to it, networking hooked up dsl so it could be networked, electrical ran power, and so on and so on.
The following is a pictorial of the dedication but more specifically the equipment.
(for higher res pics you can go to my photo gallery)
This picture shows the steel container and one of the three antenna towers.
This view shows the power and phone patch panel on the left and the server station in front.
Notice the setup. More detail in the next closeup. The radio system requires DC power so you'll notice the battery system which powers the radio and will maintain a charge for several days should the power go out.
In this closeup, you see the radio (center), a ups on the left, the power converters on the right, the dsl modem on the left, and the antenna cables coming in from the top. The copper bar behind the UPS is the grounding cable. Notice the small black bock between the radio and the UPS. This is a radio receiver and is part of a different project. In this country you have no FCC. So when requesting a new radio frequency (which we sorely need our traffic is so much) the government asks YOU to tell them which frequency is unused. So this receiver is attached to an antenna and is scanning the range we want 24 hours a day and logging any traffic found. After several months we will analyze the data and tell the government which frequency we want. The risk is, without doing this work, that we purchase a frequency that is being used elsewhere, because no one seems to record the used frequencies.. which also means someone could eventually be using the ones we have. (all the more reason to acquire more frequencies).
For jury rigging fans, notice in the very front is a webcam. It is pointed at the frequency of the radio. The server software is unable to interface with the radio to the point of telling us what frequency it is currently on, so every time the server receives an incoming connection, it snaps a pic with the webcam, and we can later compare if we need to check logs, the picture with the time stamp to see what frequency was used. If no incoming call, the radio scans channels until it receives one.
Also this room gets VERY warm. All this equipment has been functioning at over 50 degrees Celsius.
Another fun note, for a while now people have been receiving jolts when touching different parts of the shed. My cohort figured out why when he received a nice jolt, the antennas were not grounded properly (had a ground loop). SO, that copper tube bent behind the ups is his invention. He grounded it well through a bolt connected at the base, then grounded outside. He flattened the top and then attached all devices to it for grounding. The shocks went away. Remarkably he didn't know much about grounding but was inspired by his shock to investigate it, and found there are plenty of people here who know that kind of stuff and were able to help him. And finally, for the super geeks who noticed that black box inline with the coaxial cable (2 inches big) that is a lightning arrestor. We have lightning and thunder storms here sometimes weekly as we are in a valley and the atmosphere lends itself to heavy electrical activity.
The power and phone patch.
People touring the container before the dedication. This effort lasted many years, and many people were involved in bringing it about. Mentioned by name was the developer of the software who is a christian and has donated the server and all the clients. An impressive homegrown software called UUplus.
Another shot of the container and people gathering.
The crowd listening on.
Below, the man on the left is the one who came up with the vision and has been driving this project. He is from Sweden and has been here ten years. The couple are translators and they are sharing how the HFemail has affected them.
A brief synopsis of what they said, "We have a daughter staying here while we're in the village, and it has been such a blessing to be able to hear from her daily and write back the same day. Yes we have radio scheduled meetings but there are personal things you can't say over the radio with everyone listening. For a long time I had to read between the lines with my daughter to find out what was on her heart. Now with hf email, I can hear from her and reply in the same day. Also at another time, we had a family crisis and the hf email system really let us feel connected and we were able to resolve it, as far away as we were." The husband shared, "when you're translating, you don't always want your work all in one place. Hf email allowed us to transfer files back to here, so we could keep backups in case something were to happen. Also we've been able to communicate from here back to the village to our translator helpers as they continue the work from there while we're here doing work on this end."
A lot of what we do is about communication. Translation is really about communication, and systems such as this help that goal. Currently maintaining this system is our responsibility as CTS network engineers. So we have been trained on it (me and the other new guy) and it is quite a thing to inherit this child. It is also quite a nice perk to this work, that we can dedicate our results to the Lord.
I may have gone overboard with all the pictures, but this was a very special day for me, and I wanted to share it with you. For the technically minded, I hope it was a small glimpse into what is going on here, for others I hope you can sense the significance I feel. I may not be a translator myself, but being able to construct and maintain systems like this, and hear testimonies from translators about how it has improved their ministry, is very, very fulfilling. I offer up all the joy inside my heart from this as praise to God who brought it to happening. Who inspired the people who donated, who worked in giving the vision, and who brought the skills together to get it done.
Praise God, His kingdom endures forever!
