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.