I've heard of the opposite, but not heard of light affecting wireless transmission before. Some satellite bands are affected by raindrops of certain size.. I guess its possible though! _____ From: Michael Davies [mailto:michael(a)hereisasite.co.nz] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 3:48 PM To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: [nznog] Wireless link adversly affected by the sun? Hi there, As the subject suggests, I've been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We're lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I've noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I've started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days. For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I've seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we've had in Dunedin for quite a while). Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this - supposing that the sun is the culprit - short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield? Regards, Michael

http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Jargon_File/26064.html http://mailman.ucc.usyd.edu.au/pipermail/usyd-net/2001-October/000038.html However on a serious note there was a time I recall that IHUG warned about an expected outage (on Satnet) due to particularly bad solar flare activity... They were able to predict this in advance so it MAY not have been completely imaginary. I don't imagine that normal sunlight will affect the link, but conceivably temperature might... Regards

...

...

On 1/08/2006 at 3:48 p.m., "Michael Davies" wrote: Hi there,

As the subject suggests, I've been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We're lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I've noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I've started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days.

For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I've seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we've had in Dunedin for quite a while).

Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this - supposing that the sun is the culprit - short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield?

Regards,

Michael

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For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I've seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we've had in Dunedin for quite a while).

How hot is the equipment concerned? We had some degraded thruput issues once which were (after some time) determined to be directly related to the temperature inside the local LAN distribution cabinet. Improved A/C helped. If your RX gear (beyond the Dish) is getting warm, thats a thought. Beyond that, usually Sunlight / good weather conditions are better for Radio, especially VHF+ frequencies. Rain fade, etc, is definately more likely than Sun fade (!) IMHO Mark.

I'll see your sun-kills-wireless and raise you a radio-ignites-atmosphere: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a960308.html Michael Davies wrote:

Hi there,

As the subject suggests, I’ve been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We’re lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I’ve noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I’ve started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days.

For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I’ve seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we’ve had in Dunedin for quite a while).

Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this – supposing that the sun is the culprit – short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield?

Regards,

Michael

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Possibly related, with satellite some LNBs suffer from a temperature- dependent frequency shift. I had signal loss on sunny days, which Sky didn't believe, and they switched decoders twice before i convinced the tech to change the LNB. He conceded that it was "quite warm". Better-quality LNBs have a PLL to avoid this. --brian On 1/08/2006, at 3:48 PM, Michael Davies wrote:

Hi there,

As the subject suggests, I’ve been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We’re lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I’ve noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I’ve started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days.

For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I’ve seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we’ve had in Dunedin for quite a while).

Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this – supposing that the sun is the culprit – short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield?

Regards,

Michael

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Brian Boutel Wellington New Zealand

Hi Michael, It would be interesting to see from your logging whether the quality of your wireless is reported as bad on sunny weekend days. This would no-doubt help in determining whether it is a spectrum interference issue, or a temperature related issue, as there is likely to be much less interference on weekends due to businesses not using as much bandwidth. While monitoring several links previously I have been able to notice trends for time of day and weekday, relating to relative throughput and ping time, nothing related to weather (other than snow) however. 10c (shiny new one), Russell. From: Michael Davies [mailto:michael(a)hereisasite.co.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 1 August 2006 3:48 p.m. To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: [nznog] Wireless link adversly affected by the sun? Hi there, As the subject suggests, I've been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We're lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I've noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I've started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days. For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I've seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we've had in Dunedin for quite a while). Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this - supposing that the sun is the culprit - short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield? Regards, Michael