The first phase of a long running project to have better broadband at SYC has just gone live.
The broadband at SYC has always been poor as we "hang off" a mile and a half of old copper wire from the Starcross Telephone Exchange. For the last eight months, the broadband has been extremely poor. This was most noticeable when using the webcam - waits of 5 to 10 seconds between clicking a webcam control and seeing the camera move were not unusual.
However, we are now using fibre broadband from Lympstone. The aerial on top of the racebox pointing towards Lympstone now carries our broadband over wi-fi. There is more tweaking to do, but we are already seeing good speeds using the link.
Huge thanks are due to many people at SYC for getting this far with the project but especially Grzegorz Kaniak (without whom the wifi link would never have happened), Robin Charles and Ian Purvis. We are also very grateful to colleagues at Lympstone Sailing Club for hosting the other end of the aerial link.
New webcam pages
To "celebrate" the better broadband, the webcam pages have been given a little bit of a polish. Try the webcam out https://www.starcrossyc.org.uk/essentials/webcam. It should all look pretty familiar but with more granular control over how much to move the camera and with a few more of the channel buoys available on the presets.
Webcam functionality for yacht / mooring owners
There is some new webcam functionality aimed specifically at SYC members who have boats on moorings off SYC. It is now possible to have your own "personal presets" so you can quickly move the camera and zoom in to your boat on its mooring. There is also the option to have "photos" taken of your boat every hour (either for security purposes or you just like photos of your boat...). There are a limited number of "personal presets" available so you need to let me know if you want access this functionality. For full details of how it all works and what you can do with it, please see this screencast.