Cloud Drip, Iguanas, and Wireless
Coqui's
Well, we managed to get done before Turkey
Day, so, with the 3 hour time difference between PR and Colorado,
we managed to fly back Thanksgiving, most of the day, but arrive
in time for evening dinner with families. With the added advantage
that the American trip down there was so booked up we were given
First Class, and so empty coming back I had three seats to myself.
But the price of all this was, I was really tired and sore
after three jungle and mountain days
and THEN the jungle of Dallas airport.
But we got everything done, amazingly, including
- thanks to Mike's roamable AT&T
cell phone - rendezvousing with everyone we wanted to, including
the head of the Puerto Rico government's Telecommunications systems
- the guy, Leo Villegas - who is *aggressively* linking up every
government office, right down to
the counties, the courts, the schools to a
super high speed (155Mbps) microwave backbone down the island's
spine and going spread spectrum Solekteck
radios from there! i.e. an entire state-sized
government using no license spread spectrum the way I think it
should be (bypassing and making the
telephone company irrelevant for moving Internet data
the last 5 miles). I am really pleased I had something to do with
this initiative after a delegation
of Puerto Rican's visited me 4 years ago,
picked my wireless brain, and they then just went out and 'Did
it.'
Would that any State's Government were so progressive!
We also, the second day, caught up with a really
neat entrepreneur who started and
owns 'Isla.Net' a wireless Internet service in Puerto Rico. Young
Felipe Hernandez, whom I identified as one of the more wireless-savy
radio engineers in Puerto Rico, whom
we may want to contract with for certain
on-the-ground tasks over the next three years. His business is
growing (www.isla.net) and he offers
wireless using the advanced 'Wiman' radios
- designed in Germany, which can operate Frame Relay, and which
he swears out performs through the
*very* intense RF clouds over PR, everybody
else's radios. Which is why, I guess, Bill Shraeder President
of PsiNet, bought out Wiman, and
offers his own wireless to corporate customers
in the US. (PSI tried to buy out Isla.Net, but Felipe is not selling,
having locked up by contract all of Puerto Rico with the Wiman
class radios. Yet he has superb relationships
with Wiman, who sold us a pair of
them (PPP configured) in an earlier NSF Project. Felipe (we visited
one of his offices - a good 25 high-energy young Puerto Ricans
run the impressive place and business),
offered, as did Bill Shraeder (when I
renewed my acquaintance with him from years past at a Cato Conference
two weeks ago), us any help we wanted.
Carte Blanche. Which is great. Felipe
even took our two Wimans - which apparently can handle the jungle
better than most other 2.4Ghz numbers - and is upgrading them
to Frame Relay - free. A neat young
business RF engineer who will be a great help,
knowing the Puerto Rican wireless scene cold - including whose
radios will give us fits on what
mountains.
That led me to make a suggestion to Leo Villegas,
the PR Governments wireless man,
whose thousands of systems will spread all over the island. He
was startled by it, but sees the sense in it. I suggested that
the Government of Puerto Rico create,
for INFORMATION and COORDINATION purposes
only - not regulatory - a total Part 15 unlicensed and Microwave
licensed, data base, where ALL Part
15 radios on the island private or public
are voluntarily listed, what radios, what frequencies, what power
levels, what antenna orientations
and gains, and point to point paths people
want to keep operating. As a public service. So all those heading
levels, what antenna orientations
and gains, and point to point paths people
want to keep operating. As a public service. So all those heading
pell mell for the no-license wireless
world can know who else is operating there.
Avoiding costly mistakes as the RF density increases greatly over
the next 25 years.
We even lucked out on the weather. One researcher
had sternly warned us that the tops
of the mountains around El Yunque are socked in by clouds and
rain three out of four days. But it turned out the opposite, in
the wake of Hurricane Lenny. Guess
the Rain Gods were tired, and took a break for
a week. The top of El Yunque, where we had to use the $30,000
spectrum analyzer to see how much
radiation from other radios on the multiple towers
up there were producing interference on bands we wanted, was clear
as a bell. (The
bands were congested!) And what a beautiful view in all
directions - with the city of San Juan laid out white on green
against the azure blue Caribbean
in the far distance.
But when we really wanted to see the effects
of rain on propagation, the weather
cooperated when we were driven to top of Punto Del Este - the
eastern high point, where on one
peak the Navy has its' radar station, and on
the ridge between two peaks is a technical weather station the
El Yunque LTER (Long Term Ecological
Research project run by Jess Zimmerman) wants us
to link up wirelessly. It's the place that the importance of 'cloud
drip' was detailed in years past.
After a scientist claimed from his data that
there was more water coming DOWN the mountains of Puerto
Rico than fell ON them - as measured by the usual rain gauges!
Nobody believed him. Until someone rigged a
mesh-like instrument where the cloud
passing over the ridge at ground level (fog like) deposited so
much water on the mesh, as it does
on vegetation, that the difference was accounted
for, i.e. cloud drip. So we will be communicating the scintillating
information of how much the clouds over Puerto Rico 'drip' while
passing over the high ridges, besides deluging them with plain
rain. And they get plenty of that.
Over 200 inches of rain (5 meters worth)
annually.
They will appreciate our connecting up this
station wirelessly (with the challenge
being getting enough light via solar panels or something else
- wind? - to keep the radio working).
For right now someone has to drive the hour
and a half four wheel route up there every two weeks to fetch
the data manually. When the rain
gets particularly heavy, the 'road' such as it
is becomes a river, roaring downhill. Which it did on our way
down.
We were dripping wet when we came down. And
know what a challenge it will be
to protect the sensitive radios from water, mold, and all the
other things that the jungle can
do to equipment. We even saw moss on chain link fencing.
But in the first mile, and while still pretty high in the ridges,
we got a treat. A full sized, bright
green Iguana was stretched out on the road.
Looked to be four feet head to tip. I got a pretty close up digital
picture of him. Fred Scatena, the
Forest Service Scientist (collaborator with
the U of Puerto Rico LTER project) who drove us up there said
it was the first time he had ever
seen an Iguana that high up - where it is colder
than the hotter tropical climes below.
Fred is a wonderful scientist, who loves his
job, and as we walk, hike, or drive,
can rattle off endlessly every detail about the immediate area
- old growth, new growth, Asian bamboo,
the ONLY huge-trunk giant tree in the
world - a 'pine' standing in the forest, and all the little variation
in the grasses, plants, vegetation,
that were caused by hurricanes past, or
by, in the area purchased in the 1930's by the Forest Service
where pitiful efforts were made to
cultivate, how the rain forest reclaimed the areas
totally, with huge trees, in less than 5 years.
Then the hard work. First climbing 3/4 mile
long wet, muddy, trails to yet another
weather station half way down the mountain, slipping, sliding
(and wearying for this 71 year old),
the end of which confronted us with the joy
of climbing straight up (steps at least) a 120 foot tower to get
above the canopy so the rain, wind,
and light coming down can be measured there.
And another tower 75 feet tall near El Verde research station
which I scrambled up. Finally having
spec'ed out all three weather stations they want
us to link up wirelessly somehow, back to El Verde, then the Center
for Tropical Ecological Studies in
San Juan, thence to the Internet at large.
After which, next morning I was SORE! So will
have to start into the training regime
I knew was coming, to lose weight and get fit to clamber over
those hills chasing the squirmy things and fat leaves, and dripping
trees, in El Junque rain forest -
the only one in the world controlled by the
Federal government - a national forest - within which the rare
Puerto Rican Parrots are protected
and very slowly recovering from their reduction
to only 13 pairs in the world in the early 70's.
Then we huddled with scientist Jill Thompson,
who with her British accent, struggles
with a tradeoff between science, technology, and costs, as she
seeks to get reliable data from a
series of 40 or so tiny light sensors on the
jungle floor - the ones costing only $8 apiece, clouding over
however, their tiny plastic protective
film from, she thinks UV radiation, while
the better sensors are $500 apiece.
THIS is a great challenge for us - to figure
out ways to link the 40 spread across
a plot, without using wires, and then feeding their data continuously
into the data base back at the center a mile away, and thence
to the Internet, where the chief scientist in Pennsylvania can
see the data, real time, too. We
may be trying to fabricate some super small radio
circuits we know about for this task - which represents for us
another 'typical' biological field
science task - gathering data from many points
in a small plot maybe 1,000 feet square. After
the weather station linkups, we will tackle this one, in what
we now call 'Phase II.' (Phase I
being the three weather stations)
As we will trying to link a series of 'streams'
data collectors, new ones being planned
by researcher Doug Schaeffer who can see the possibilities
for us connecting up his experiment on Sonadora Creek - using
Campbell Scientific data loggers. On the other hand, Fred is using
Sutron brand equipment, apparently
a little more affordable by the Forest Service.
Sometime being the difference between $2,500 and $5,000 apiece.
But that's good for us, cause we
will be experimenting with more than one line
of scientific equipment.
But the challenge in communicating data from
'streams' here, being, streams in
El Yunque are down in ravines, 100 feet below the canopy, surrounded
by *very* thick rain forest vegetation which won't let those 902Mhz
or 2.4Ghz signals through very far! So will we have to feed the
tiny signals to a satellite? Stay
tuned.
(It ALSO illustrates why, in remote and rural
areas, the FCC oughta really rethink
the way they 'regulate' the frequencies which can be used, no
license. Here is a case - which will
be duplicated ALL over the world, not just
US - where scientific field censors in the most ecologically threatened
areas, have to, at great labor-intensive costs, be read manually,
because the frequencies allocated by the FCC are so high in the
spectrum, that there is no way radios
confined to them (902Mhz up to the 5.8Ghz
levels) will ever 'penetrate' the jungle to bring monitoring data
spectrum,
out to the researchers and the Internet.
Yet lower frequencies, even with low
power *could* link the scientists and monitoring agencies with
their equipment, without doing diddly
squat to commercial radio signals in urban areas.)
Finally I was ecstatic when one of the researchers,
Victor Cuevas, got the green light from his boss to work with
me in hooking up not ONE but TWO subspecies of Eleutherodactylus
(the tiny Coqui' frogs) on the top of Mount Toro - the Richmondi
species which sings at dusk, and the much more elusive Eneidae
species which sings only after midnight. So while I will have
to huff and puff my way 4 hours up the muddy trail to the top
of Mount Tori to set up the microphones, interface, wireless,
and power supply, I can't wait until *you* can click on my
http://wireless.oldcolo.com
web site, and, with real audio
and a speaker at your end, listen to the chorus of the only place
in the world the after-midnight Coqui live, and sing.
It will take Mike and I about a week to decode
all our notes and post, illustrated
by the many digital photos we took, and schematics and maps we
collected, our Progress Reports from
this November 1999 site and task survey
trip to Puerto Rico. We will be back there in January, connecting
up things, after we do the fabrication
and interfacing to radios required.
The Wireless Coqui Chorus from atop Mount Toro
and El Yunque Rain Forest is about
to begin on the Internet. Stay Tuned!
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