wok-fi madness
Life has moved on since my days in the computer store. In 2005 I began my career in IT Support working for the Oscar®-winning Sound Department of Big Primate Productions, the production company behind Peter Jackson's King Kong.
When that film was (pretty much) complete I went to work on the family movie The Water Horse, filmed on location in Queenstown and in Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand.
I wrote this article at the request of Telecom New Zealand and it appeared in an edited form in the August 2006 edition of Telecommunications Review
“WokFi” Down South
by Peter Edge
IT/Technical Support, Water Horse Productions Ltd.
It's really all about the fortuitous parabolic curvature of Asian culinary apparatus...Recently, Water Horse Productions were on location in the South Island on an isolated sheep station on the far side of Lake Wakatipu shooting scenes for the feature film The Water Horse. Producer Barrie Osborne, veteran producer of the Lord of the Rings films called upon IT Consultants Chris Winter and Pete Edge to find a cost-effective Internet solution for the on set crew that would support E-mail and Vonage® VoIP. However, the location was too far from the nearest exchange to have land-based broadband Internet, and satellite or microwave technology was beyond the modest budget of The Water Horse.
A film crew rarely stays in the same place for longer than a day at a time, and will reposition cameras and equipment numerous times during the course of the day. Wireless networking seemed the obvious solution as most of the crew who required Internet access on set had wireless capable laptops.
In addition to a Base Camp at the sheep station, the film company set up a Production Office at the Rydges Hotel in Queenstown, about 30km away on the other side of the lake. The initial plan was to attach a high powered wireless access point (WAP) to the standard Telecom NZ broadband router and propagate the Internet to the location across the lake from the hotel. Unfortunately, the terrain made it impossible for a single direct line-of-sight connection, the signal would have to be bounced of a series of repeater stations in between. Propagating a signal in such a way over 30km would need specialist equipment, and hand in hand with specialist equipment often comes astronomical cost.
It was at this point that Asian cookware came into the mix.
Enter Stan Swan; career educator, inventor and, among many other things, WiFi enthusiast. Stan demonstrated that professional quality satellite or microwave apparatus operate on a relatively simple principle. Stan had experimented for years with home-made parabolic reflectors, improving the directivity and range of cheap USB WiFi dongles from a local electronics store. His website www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz showcases some of the weird and wonderful WiFi antennae he produced from household items – even a flexible plastic ruler held in a curve by a piece of string will work, if you position your aerial correctly! He and his students from Massey University managed to increase the standard operational range of a $50 device from 300 metres up to 5 kilometres line-of-sight using a 12-inch wire mesh wok strainer as parabolic reflector. “WokFi” was born.
With Stan's help, Chris Winter and Pete Edge presented a new solution to the production company. The key technological component of this solution was the Axesstel AXW-D800 Fixed Wireless Router, supplied by Advanced Portable Technologies (www.pccard.co.nz). The AXW-D800 is essentially a cellphone with high-gain antennae that uses Telecom NZ's CDMA network to access the Internet on demand at speeds up to 2.4Mbps (downstream).
The AXW-D800 supplies Internet connectivity only, it is not a wireless access point (WAP), so a domestic WAP coupled with a high-gain aerial from a local electronics store was connected to the unit's Ethernet port. The WAP aerial was then positioned at the focal point of a 12-inch wire mesh wok strainer, and the whole kit and caboodle was waterproofed with a creative amalgamation of domestic plasticware, prophylactics and party balloons. And gaffer's tape. Lots of it.
One of these rather hokey-looking contraptions managed to propagate a high-speed Internet signal to a remote WAP over a distance of about 1.5km, line-of-sight. Using this link, Chris Winter and Pete Edge held a clear audio iChat conversation with production staff in Wellington from a tent in the middle of Base Camp.
Several more trips to the hardware store, another roll of gaffer's tape, and further “creative prophylaxis” produced a second unit, consisting of Axesstel router, WAP, and wok strainer antenna. One unit followed the crew around the location, the other stayed at Base Camp. Each unit ran off electricity from generators on-site where possible, but could run off 12 volt gel cell batteries if necessary. The Base Camp unit was installed at the place with the best cellphone reception near the camp. Repeater WAPs set up in the windows of various trucks, trailers and campervans propagated a relatively stable Internet connection of speeds up to 1.5Mbps (downstream) throughout most of the camp.
The mobile unit was attached to a sack barrow to facilitate movement around the set, and featured a telescoping pole (scavenged from a window washing brush), atop which sat the WAP and wok strainer in their creative waterproofing. In areas around the sheep station where Telecom NZ's CDMA network reception was poor, a mobile repeater unit (yet another window washing pole, wok strainer and WAP) was deployed. In spite of extremes of weather, environmental obstacles and fluctuations in available bandwidth, users in most of the shooting locations could at least send and receive E-mail via the mobile unit.
The rigours of transportation and relocation, the aforementioned extremes of weather coupled with an unending programme of on-the-fly R&D changed the shape of the mobile unit over the shooting period. Overall, however, the equipment attrition rate over the six weeks of shooting was surprisingly minimal – all of the WAPs and both AXW-D800 units survived intact and are currently still in use, although the “creative prophylactic units” buckled under the pressure and currently exist only in their mud-spattered component parts: cracked plastic lunch boxes, bent wok strainers, hose fittings, window washer poles, torn party balloons, cable ties and gaffer's tape.
The sack barrow is no more, having lost its wheels to the mud of the Mainland.