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?