21.12.19 Wifi problems cured?

Saturday 43F: After a long, grey start, the sun came out too late in the morning. So that it was already over the house roof.  Not ideal for good seeing conditions at this time of year with the sun so low in the sky. I rushed out and set up just before lunch. Synced and tracking but with the shutters blocking the sun. So now I'm ready for imaging as soon as lunch has gone down. Gong Ha shows a hedge-like prom at 10 o'clock but little more than small, bright smudges on the disk.

I want to try to get some temperature readings at focus without the PST etalon and following filters. No chance! The moment I was back in the dome, cloud covered the entire southerly horizon. At least it proved that the telescopes are blocking the Wifi. As soon as I sent them back to park [horizontal & facing east] the internet immediately came back on again. I'd previously tried all sort of heights, positions and angles for the laptop but nothing helped. The signal is just too weak.

The indoor router was always pressed up against the sloping, attic ceiling at waist height. There was nowhere else for it except on top of the rarely used printer. This meant no air around the antennae and the full thickness of the roof for the wireless signal to pass through. Before crossing the yard to the dome. About 15-17m away from memory. [40'-50'.] I had no desire to stretch a cable across the intervening gap. The indirect route over there, from the house, is more like 30 meters with lots of changes in level.

So, before investing in a Wifi repeater I have moved the indoor router. It is now vertically on the wall near the top of the projecting, dormer "box." Where it can "see" the dome through the window. Whether glass is more radio transparent to radio waves, than 12" of rock wool, the roof covering and thick lead flashing, is anybody's guess. I shall check tomorrow to see if it helped reception in the dome.

The wireless Internet was just far too variable over there in the observatory without obvious cause. Other than the three, large, metal telescopes literally hanging over the laptop on the desk below. ASCOM kept saying it had lost the server today! I had no idea it needed one. How on earth can you run an ASCOM driven eq. mounting at a dark site well away from the Internet? Or with a typical US, UK or Australian, rural bottleneck? Does not compute!

Moving the indoor router has worked wonders! 30+Mbps download and 50+Mbps upload on the laptop flat on the desk, out in the observatory. Normally I would have to put the laptop on top of a box to get any reception under poor conditions.

I deliberately slewed the telescopes over the laptop and nothing much changed in Wifi speeds. Slight improvement in upload speeds if anything. Playing 60fps 4K YT videos went smoothly. I just had to tidy the four, white, dangling cables, indoors with some tie-wraps. Only further tests in different conditions will prove if I have overcome the previous Wifi problems. Though the change in router position seems to be a huge improvement.

Monday. Another grey day. Went back over with the laptop to check Wifi reception in the dome. With the telescopes parked it was over 20Mbps down and 50 up. The latest download of Malwarebytes Free is broken. It refuses to let me online whatever I try. It has done this on both my computers now and I have had to uninstall it. Reinstall? Exactly the same problem on both. 4.01.49? I've been using it for years and it hasn't behaved like this before. Found a replacement.

A new [faster] version of iMPPG is available for download from github:

imppg-win64.zip

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