Skype schematic sharing won't work

[Joerg]

Take a look at DU Meter http://www.hageltech.com/dumeter/about.
Inexpensive, 30-day free trial period, and they've been around for
years. Many more options than I routinely use.

Thanks, Rich. But first I'll try to get more speed. Because even if I
find Skype to have a bug they won't care one bit.

 

[Joerg]

[...]

I walk a lot through the neighborhoods, on account of two Labradors
who'd get cranky otherwise. Then you see a lot of utility work. When the
AT&T guys come they often show up with heavy duty equipment. The cable
guys ... with a glorified circular saw and some sort of caulking gun.



There's a house going up across the valley, phone line is in a trench
just like power, water and sewer. Out here they often use the same
trench as the electric utility.

Yikes!



Thanks. Their coverage map shows me right at the edge of "fair" and
"off-network roaming". ...

That was the same here when we got the service many years ago. Since
there was (and still is) no contract I just gave it a shot and it worked
anyways. I got 1-2 bars in the house and some dead spots. Now it
improved, they must have placed a new tower. But I have no idea how the
data speeds would be because I only buy basic talk service.

The funny thing is I occasionally had to hand my bone-simple Nokia 2115i
to business folks who could not get a connection with their fancy smart
phones.

... My Verizon coverage isn't anything to write
home about but I don't want to be roaming (which is probably Verizon).
Sounds like it's not an option for me.

This is their plan:

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phone-plans/beyond-talk-plans/overview/

The nice thing is that there is no contract. Paid per month and that's
it. It says unlimited but in the fine print there is a 2.5GB limit after
which it slows down. Somewhere I have heard that it may not apply to 4G
connections but I am not sure.

I was seriously looking into Page Plus Cellular. They have an
unlimited talk/text plan with 2GB data for $55. It's $70 with 5GB.
Page Plus uses the Verizon network. Since Verizon is raising my price
in the middle of the contract, I'll probably switch in January.

Isn't it illegal for them to raise prices if you've got a contract?

 

[[email protected]]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2013 15:58:46 -0400, [email protected] wrote:

[email protected] wrote:

[...]

DSL: 4ft under ground, goes to a very professional looking stainless
steel cabinet which is securely locked, always clean, even has a
maintained defensible space around it so fires won't lick right up to it.
Wrong. Mine was less than 4" underground. My shovel found it while I
was putting in brick edging around the flower bed.

That's shoddy work. When we called Digalert before building a fence I
was surprised about the depth. IIRC the woman who came out for the phone
company said they are required to maintain 2ft.
This ain't your father's phone company. This is now the norm for
residential phone service. Basically, they just "stitch" the wire
into the sod and call it a day.

I walk a lot through the neighborhoods, on account of two Labradors
who'd get cranky otherwise. Then you see a lot of utility work. When the
AT&T guys come they often show up with heavy duty equipment. The cable
guys ... with a glorified circular saw and some sort of caulking gun.

You live on a rock? They *certainly* don't here. The tool looks more
like a motorized knife on a power washer cart. Slit the turf and pull
the cable. If there is a trench open when they run the cable, they
may drop it in but that's rare.

There's a house going up across the valley, phone line is in a trench
just like power, water and sewer. Out here they often use the same
trench as the electric utility.

Sounds dangerous.

Yikes!

High, but that's what money is for.

That was the same here when we got the service many years ago. Since
there was (and still is) no contract I just gave it a shot and it worked
anyways. I got 1-2 bars in the house and some dead spots. Now it
improved, they must have placed a new tower. But I have no idea how the
data speeds would be because I only buy basic talk service.

The tower locations are shown in maps at fcc.gov. I don't have the
links right now.

The funny thing is I occasionally had to hand my bone-simple Nokia 2115i
to business folks who could not get a connection with their fancy smart
phones.

Probably a deprecated band.

This is their plan:

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phone-plans/beyond-talk-plans/overview/

The nice thing is that there is no contract. Paid per month and that's
it. It says unlimited but in the fine print there is a 2.5GB limit after
which it slows down. Somewhere I have heard that it may not apply to 4G
connections but I am not sure.



Isn't it illegal for them to raise prices if you've got a contract?

Apparently IBM no longer has a special deal with them (only T-Mobile).
I think they just figured it out. I have to check to see if my CPOE
has a deal, Oh well, they'll lose a customer in six months (I've been
with them since '00). I was thinking about going with a
pay-as-you-go Verizon plan but not if they're going to raise my rate.

 

[Fred Abse]

Cable TV: Coaxes slobbering across flower beds and soil, rocks. Boxes
often have their lid off kilter, no locks attached, one got crushed quite
a bit in an accident a few months ago and they left it that way. Many
boxes in tall dry grass and weeds. Cables under road surfaces are often 2"
below surfcae or less. Often exposed in the ditch.

To me this is a day and night difference. A new neighbor learned this as
well. The cable guys couldn't get his Internet going for over a month so
he took the slower DSL.

Git 'r done!

 

[[email protected]]

I think you mean the FCC ASR (Antenna Structure Registration).
<http://wireless.fcc.gov/geographic/index.htm?job=licensing_database_extracts>
Only towers that are over 200ft or are near an airport need to be
registered:
<http://www.fcc.gov/help/antenna-structure-registration-asr-help>
Few cell towers are over 200ft.

More:
<http://www.towermaps.com/fcc.htm>
Note that most cell sites are NOT registered with the FCC. If you
believe the CTIA, there are 300,000 cell sites in the USA:
<http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/research/index.cfm/aid/10323>
However, that doesn't include repeaters, microcellular, DAS
(distributed antenna systems), Small Cells, leaky coax in tunnels,
water towers, church steeples, and many building mounted sites that do
not involve a tower.

No, that's not it. This site had all cell towers listed, including
church steeples. ;-) The information included latitude longitude,
owner, network, and a bunch of other stuff.

 

[Joerg]

0.3% is good enough and better than most for TCP. However, you should
run Skype Echo Test or talk with someone using Skype first, and then
check the UDP, not the TCP statistics. VoIP (and video) are both UDP,
not TCP.

Have to do that, but IIRC those numbers looked comparably good. I do not
think it's any packet error issue. It is very repeatable. Skype with
camera video works and the instant I switch to screen sharing it falls
apart. So we have resorted to low-tech, sketching stuff on paper and
holding it up to the camera. Then Skype doesn't fail. My Logitech camera
isn't very good though, no dynamic range to write home about, very
grainy picture because I am sitting with the back to a window.

It's the percentage of your ethernet bandwidth. If you have a
100Mbit/sec ethernet connection to your router, and your DSL is
running at 1.5Mbits/sec, you'll see a tiny 1.5% maximum display on the
graph. This piece of brilliant design was brought to you by the
wonderful folks at Microsoft.

Shazam! They were quite smart then.

[...]

Parallel ports are so 20th century. Kinda sounds like an old router,
which may be the cause of the slow speeds. I've replaced various
Netgear WGR614 series routers that seemed to slow down after about 5
years in service. No failures, just a slow down. No clue what that
was about, but replacing the router with something more current made a
big difference. You might also look into the benefits of ethernet
connected laser printers. Incidentally, the typical complaint was not
VoIP problems but rather problems streaming YouTube and Netflix
videos.

Well, I tend to keep stuff that works regardless of how "modern" it is.
This old HP-5L is around 15 years old but keeps on humming. So I need LPT.

Other than Skype everything runs fine. Skype has had other problems in
the beginning but that got fixed when they released a newer version. The
screen sharing never worked right.

It will help when you're transferring files at the same time that
you're talking on Skype or reading something on the internet at the
same time.

I never do that unless someone requests it during the call, and then we
all know it's going to come at the price of a rocky link. Until I can
get faster Internet. The amazing thing is, GoToMeeting will then slow
down the video but screen sharing keeps working. Because if implemented
correctly that really doesn't need any bandwidth to speak of if a static
drawing where only a cursor is moving. Same for the "etch-a-sketch"
function.

 

[Joerg]

No, that's not it. This site had all cell towers listed, including
church steeples. ;-) The information included latitude longitude,
owner, network, and a bunch of other stuff.

Would be nice if you remembered that link. Because everything I tried
before getting my cell phone was incomplete as Jeff said. Since the guys
at the telco couldn't tell me either I literally drove down to where I
remembered was a collection cell antennas on a pole. Couldn't say which
companies were on there. Why don't they list that _on_ the pole? So I
asked around until I found someone on the Sprint network to see if he
gets full bars on that stretch of road. He did, so I knew I can make
this work from my lab. Sounds pathetic, but that was the only way.

Now that I have a very portable spectrum analyzer (Signalhound) I could
have found out immediately by driving there.

[...]

 

[Joerg]

[...]

Since the guys
at the telco couldn't tell me either I literally drove down to where I
remembered was a collection cell antennas on a pole.

Many cell sites are sufficiently disguised that visual identification
is impossible.
<http://celltowersites.com/cell-site-photo-gallery/camouflaged-cell-sites/>

Our here they have conifera telecommunicensi or whatever. I see from a
mile away that those ain't real pine trees.

You can sorta guess by the frequencies that are being used. I found a
chart of frequencies in use by various vendors by geographic area.
I'll see if I can find it again.

It is almost the only way. Or drive through town with a cell phone for
the respective provider on the dashboard and the field strength displayed.

Not required by FCC, PUC, or any other manufacturer of rules and
regulations. Besides, a sign would be instantly vandalized.


Careful. Sprint and Verizon roam into each others territories. Full
bars on one provider could be an indication of roaming into the other.
Check the roaming indicator.

If you want more detail, dive into the "field test mode" for the cell
phone to get the carrier and tower ID.
<http://www.wpsantennas.com/pdf/testmode/fieldtestmodes.pdf>
There are also iphone and Android apps for getting this information.
Mark the carrier and tower ID on the pole so I don't have to work so
hard.

I have a simple Nokia 2115i. There is a hack on how to get it to display
real signal strength numbers instead of dumbed-down bars. But I believe
that's it.

Nice. Which model and how do you like it?
<http://www.signalhound.com>

The SA44B plus the matching track gen. It's great. Slower and a little
iffier than a regular SA but that is not surprise because it's
essentially lika a glorified 250kHz SDR with pre-mixer. It's first job
was EMC pre-compliance and the final lab plots can in almost exactly on
the money, despite my makeshift antennas.

 

[Joerg]

Yeah, the local cell tower camouflage is getting better. An old first
attempt (which is still standing). Must have been a drought:
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/AmestiAT&T.jpg>

I haven't seen one this ugly before.

This one should be banned for indecent RF exposure:
<http://802.11junk.com/cellular/sprint05.jpg>

Oh, that one is embarrassing. I am surprised that none of the graffiti
kids have "obscened it up" yet.

When art and technology mix, usually technology wins.



Verizon and others have vehicles that drive around allegedly doing
quality checks on their maps.
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394615,00.asp>
<http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/13/a-look-inside-verizons-test-car-we-go-heads-in-at-ctia-eanda-201/>

This (slow) map should help:
<http://specmap.sequence-omega.net>
Try "by carrier" for a small area or it will take forever.

Their map zooming is broken. It pops all over California when I try to
zoom in.

I have a simple Nokia 2115i. There is a hack on how to get it to display
real signal strength numbers instead of dumbed-down bars. But I believe
that's it.

Nokia "Shorty" or CDMA "candy bar" phone. I have one in my pile,
somewhere, maybe. The 2115i was sold by Virgin and MetroPCS and has
few wiz-bang features.
<http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=717>

Try:
*3001#12345#
Scroll to FIELD TEST and hit [SELECT]
Scroll to ENABLE and hit OK
Turn the phone off and turn it back on.
Instead of the barf graph, you should see numbers in dBm.

I have that routine printed out somewhere, but there was none about how
to get it back.

I played with one for a few minutes and immediately saw a potential
problem. It apparently does anti-aliasing and removes mixer spurs
from the display in software, which takes a long time. ...

Yes, that is a downside. But I can live with the slow speed because for
me size and weight is very important.

... When I swing
it around to see changes in RF levels for direction finding and
circuit tweaking, it responds very slowly. I was impressed by the
size, but I think I'll stick with my fast responding analog boat
anchor for now.

But only at home. If in the car you might be in for a surprise at the
end of the job. Turn the ignition key ... click ... followed by silence

 

[Joerg]

[...]

But only at home. If in the car you might be in for a surprise at the
end of the job. Turn the ignition key ... click ... followed by silence

I routinely carry about 100ft of AC extension cords. My IFR-1500 and
Wavetek 3000a both run on 12V, so that's easy enough. Most of what I
do is on mountain tops, where there's plenty of both conventional AC
power, and backup generator power. Most of the building have AC
battery chargers available so that we can use the vehicle headlights
for night work without running the engine. Much as I would like a
more portable instrument, the convenience factor isn't sufficient
justification. Well, there is one justification. Carrying the boat
anchors up and down 30 or 50 stairs is getting really old.
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/home/slides/BL-stairs.html>

Boy oh boy oh boy. I hope you have good medical and liability insurance.
Those stairs look like a disaster waiting to happen and the electric
stuff underneath doesn't look 100% code-compliant either

 

[Fred Abse]

Sounds like he lives in 'Green Acres' and tried to use the
Hooterville TV & Bait Shop.

s/Hooterville/Placerville

;-)