Mining in BC's far North can be a lonely affair. The old timers were thousands of miles from home for months or even years at a time. Communications with family and friends was next to impossible. Even today, communications is sporadic and somewhat expensive as the only contact with the outside world is a VHF radiotelephone. There are no cell phones, no payphones, no "land lines" on Holloway Bar. But, we've been working on bringing new technology to the placer mine - and the first stage is now almost complete!
Here you can see part of the antenna system that's currently installed at the mine. The small white antenna you see attached to the green 2x4 on the roof is hooked into our wireless network router at camp. But, you might be asking yourself "Why on earth do they need a wireless network at Holloway Bar? What could they possibly be doing with that type of equipment?"
Well, I'm a technology buff. A dozen years ago, when my main interest was running a modem-based Bulletin Board System in Terrace, I installed and operated a satellite data feed supplying thousands of shareware files and Usenet newsgroups to the BBS callers in Northern BC. So, why not do something with technology at the gold mine? So, an idea was born...
I travelled to Holloway Bar over the May long weekend to install the 802.11g wireless router, a large external antenna with 8db gain, and three webcams in their home-built outdoor enclosures. Two of these are located some distance from base camp so use small directional antennas to beam their signal back to camp.
These web cams won't be streaming video to www.hollowaybar.com - we just won't have the bandwidth available to to that for the foreseeable future. But, we will be using the FTP capabilities of these three wireless web cameras to automatically update the hollowaybar.com webcam page on a regular and frequent basis.
Initially, we'll set the cameras to update the images on the webcam page every few minutes during daylight hours, but on days when there's something going on, we'll update more often!
But, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. The cameras we're using to capture and send images of Holloway Bar to the Internet are designed for inside use - but we're going to be using them outside. So, the first thing I needed to do was to construct enclosures for the webcams and the directional antennas used to beam the signals back to camp. When I looked into the cost of proper enclosures for these webcams, I found that they were priced 2 to 3 times the actual cost of the camera. So, I headed off to the plumbing section of the local hardware store to see what I could find...
Here's one of the webcams along with a nice collection of 4" plumbing supplies - a plastic tee, a plastic cap, and a heavy plastic coupler which will hold the clear plexiglass "lens" insert. This, along with a bit of silicone and some green and red paint, is pretty much all that is needed to build a weatherproof enclosure.
We started by drilling a hole in the top of the tee - this is where we'll mount the camera.
