Photo downloads with and without audio

Screensnap image of a clip showing of the effect of downloading a photo during an active VoIP call

A clip showing of the effect of downloading a photo during an active VoIP call (Video - 15.8MB).(video capture from screen)

The final test we did with Paul at the volcano yesterday was to download a photo while talking on the VoIP phone at the same time. The router currently gives no priority (or Quality of Service preferences) to audio data – all data gets treated with equal priority. As a result while we’re filling the bandwidth with photo information the audio drops out. This could be solved by setting a Quality of Service preference for audio data. The image would then download slower, but the audio conversation would be maintained. Another option is to self regulate the conversation and keep quiet while waiting for downloads or other priority data.

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EarthWatch

I must draw readers attention to the charitable organisation EarthWatch who allow anyone to come on numerous field trips to act as a volunteer to help the researchers.

Checkout their website for full details as you do not need to know anything about a given topic in order to help! And your contribution will help support EarthWatch’s work.

Also check out how an EarthWatch attendance could count towards credits toward an Open University course at EarthWatch February Newsletter

Photos and some Skype over the BGAN from Masaya Volcano

Video screen clip of photos downloading over the BGAn link

Photo download video clip (5.4MB) - showing the time taken to download a new thumbnail page and a new photo.

On Saturday Paul went back up to Masaya volcano for a couple of hours in the morning. Again we used the BGAN terminal to connect to the Internet. As before, we used Skype text chat throughout as our back channel for communication. The Ricoh WiFi camera worked well for taking pictures and sending them over the local WiFi network to the Asus server, where I could then access them from the UK. This time I managed to get a video of the process to show the performance of the service (see clip). The thumbnail images came down in about 11 seconds and a full picture took about 23 seconds. This is certainly usable for getting live photos from the field.

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