I couldn’t bring myself to blog last week I was so cross - things were definitely not going my way and despite having top notch kit, a lovely day, plenty of time, and no excuses I couldn’t get the naffing new webcam to work up the Lighthouse.

Everything worked perfectly at home, I got all the external stuff mounted, all the wires routed and clipped. I turn it on and then run into problem after problem. The camera doesn’t seem to be working, I forgot to turn the new wireless rig in my roof on so I had to run back home to do that but still the Access Point couldn’t see any signal. All in all I was up and down those blasted stairs at least 10 times.

For a break then I take the old camera down to Cliff House and mount it in one of the front windows - at least something works. So I return to the Lighthouse and start eliminate issues one by one.

As the day was drawing in and it was starting to get dark - I had a breakthrough and discovered what was wrong - for 2 feet I had the network cable to the camera cable tied to the wifi coax running to the external antenna - there was only one route from inside the lantern to outside and all cables were using it.

If I turned the camera off, the access pooint started picking up signals, and vice-versa - I was suffering from cross-talk.

That discovery having been made I didn’t have enough time to fix the job but could I bodge it enough to work until my next opportunity to play? Almost - I made a silly mistake on network addressing for the camera that I didn’t notice until I got home, and trying to adjust subnets remotely I made another mistake and locked myself out of the repeater up the lighthouse.

Anyway, I get the key this afternoon and go up there all tooled up and feeling confident. Despite initial problems where nothing seemed to want to be playing ball, I worked through it methodically and suddenly I’d started getting pictures posted to the website - success! So I’m a happy bunny now.

For reference, the camera is now an Axis 211 in the Verso external housing kit (very tidy, but quite a costly setup) with a Linksys WAP54G access point at either end of the wireless link, each with external antennae (an 8dB Omni on the house and a 12dB directional up the Lighthouse). It appears I’ve got a good strong link between the two - fingers crossed it stays that way.

I set up a webcam over a year ago mounted on Happisburgh Lighthouse looking at the end of Beach Road - it was a bit tricky because of the exposed location, and that there was no local Internet connection.

I bought a D-Link Wireless IP camera on eBay, put it in a cheap external housing with an external wifi antenna to make the 1 mile jump back to my house. I’m running a homebrew access point aounr an old Pentium II box, a Netgear 802.11b PCI card, and a stripped down OS called pebble with an extension to allow meshing - the original idea was to build a wireless network around the village to share a Satellite link before the days when we realised we would get Broadband.

So the setup works, but it’s a bit poor. Now something’s finally getting done at Happisburgh I thought I’d try and improve things, but I’ve got several hundred quid’s worth of gear invested already, without all the time I’ve had to put in, so I put an appeal out on the Happisburgh site for sponsors.

At this point I have to thank John Opie from www.woodstoves.co.uk and www.woodfuels.co.uk and Robert Ferguson for answering that appeal and giving me a budget for some proper gear. But life’s not that simple - it may be old gear but it’s a complex setup and it’s stable. I’ve got the entire new system working at home, but when I tried to start upgrading bits everything fell over.

Somehow, I’ve got to upgrade the whole lot in one go - and that’s going to take a bit of doing for one person. When you’re in controlled circumstances and you can tweak one variable at a time it’s quite easy to get things working. However, it’s a pain in the derrier to drive from home to the lighthouse, park, unlock, climb all the way to the top, tweak, find I need to tweak something at home so climb in and down, lock up, drive home …

If it was easy, would it be as much fun though?