Planned service disruption: public/open experiment - June 26, 2018

I plan to run an open experiment to test higher datarates over the current beam. In addition to the official receivers at Outernet HQ, I would like to receive data from other receivers as well - that can only happen with forum-member participation.

How to participate:

On June 26th, 2018:

At 1pm US Eastern: I will switch the beam to Beamtype 227 for 1 hour. If you wish to receive the new faster beam, you will need to go into skylark as the outernet user, and in the Tuner application set custom beam parameters to Frequency 11.9024, Beamtype 227. Then in the first tab, select custom beam (don’t worry if the new values aren’t reflected in the first tab), and then hit apply. You should again start receiving, hopefully at a faster packet rate - the ideal packet rate (100% reception) is 19.1pps and bitrate is 36600bps.

At 2pm US Eastern: I will switch the beam to Beamtype 226 for 1 hour. Same as above, set Beamtype in custom to 226, hit apply in tuner app. Ideal packet rate is 33.8pps and bitrate is 64800bps. There is a good chance this will not work for most people - at all.

If the above work reasonably well, I will try the next beamtype as well:

At 3pm US Eastern: I will switch the beam to Beamtype 225 for 1 hour. Same as above, set Beamtype in custom to 225, hit apply in tuner app. Ideal packet rate is 58.1 and 111500bps.

At 4pm US Eastern: I will switch the beam back to normal beamtype (228), so at this point switch back to the “Americas” preset in the Tuner app, and hit apply. Its possible I will do this sooner in case the earlier steps show very little success.

For people who do not wish to participate, this will be the equivalent to a planned service disruption. Leave the receivers untouched and they should be functioning normally again latest by 4pm US Eastern.

For people who do wish to participate: please make sure your receiver(s) are setup to report telemetry (STA mode and access to internet). Without that I won’t receive the necessary data points. Monitor this thread for updates and discussion during the test time window. Do not try to repoint the LNBs during the test - if you wish to do any repoint-ing etc, its best to do it a few hours before the test starts, or after the end of the test. Re-pointing during the test will ruin baselines.

Thanks for your help!

2 Likes

I want to help, but I will be at work. Is there a mode (Most important 225 or 226) that I could set it to before I leave for the day?

227 is best. Honestly 226 is going to be a stretch.

If there are more people who can’t babysit the rcvs, then maybe we can go round-robin and coordinate in this thread.

Install Team Viewer on home computer and on work computer. Then, you make the changes from work like you were at home.

Starting in 5 minutes.

Now on beamtype 227.

a little late but I got teamspeak loaded. thanks to my son at home.

my status is showing blank at 227

did you end up having to reboot?

Status is blank when the receiver has not received a packet since boot.

switching to 226 in 10 minutes.

I tried a reboot using the network app, but it still came back blank.

What was your SNR and packet rate at 228?

tell you what, I will switch back to 228 for the remaining 5 minutes in the hour before going to 226. If you switch to 228 as well, atleast you will be able to reconfirm that you are able to receive packets on the normal beamtype.

now back at 228 for 4 minutes. will switch to beamtype 226 at 2pm Eastern.

now on beamtype 226

It doesn’t appear to be working for me, switching the beam, when you switched it back to 228 I had status, but switching it to 226 it is blank again.

Is the Satellite window supposed to update? It is not for me after I hit apply.

226 not giving stable results here

the Tuner app won’t update, except the status tab. If you close it and re-open it, it will show the new configured values.

If you are not seeing status updates on 226 or 227, its cause the signal strength at your receiver isn’t enough to support the faster beams.