Long time no see

A couple of days ago I contacted a couple who live in Queensland.  We knew them well when our two families were on the same government station in the Sepik District of Papua New Guinea; Maprik.

Bob and Marion lived on the station and we, Joan, Helen and Martin, had a house in Bainyik, some 5 miles from Maprik where the Vocational Centre was.  I was the manager of the centre.   Bob was a teacher at Maprik Primary A School.  In 1973 Bob and Marion transferred up the Sepik River to be HT of Ambunti PS.  That was 41 years ago and the last time we saw each other.  If my wife Joan were still here I am certain that we would be on a plane to visit Bob and Marion next week.  I will make my way east some time soon.

Bob and Marion tell me that I did see Bob, at least, in 1975 at Kwikila when I was en route to a wedding at Hula in the Central District of PNG.

Recently I have noticed a sudden drop in my download speed from my provider, VividWireless.    I would normally get speeds of 5-8MB download, but it had dropped down to .16MB.    VividWirelss provides a 4G service wirelessly from towers and ‘mirrors’ throughout Australia.   

Their techies talked me through testing speeds at various locations around the house which was done by using a laptop logged in to a site 192.168.1.1.   It comes up like this.....click to enlarge.

In the BSID part of the panel, 9f-10 shows the tower at Coolbellup (a local suburb) is the one I am connected to.

There are other panels, but moving around the house with the modem told me/us which tower we were connected to and which gave the best signal.  When a tower was found I had to do a speed test at Speedtest.net and it gave download speeds for each position.  If you are going to do the speedtest, look carefully as it is easy to click a download for some other worthless piece of software.   Eventually I took the modem back to its original position and shifted it 2 metres to the right and I now have a reasonable download speed of around 5.8MB.   Whew!

My modem (Home Gateway) showing  signal strength.