A PASTORALIST in the North East of SA set up his own wireless broadband after being frustrated with limited service and access.
Lilydale station manager Todd Noakes said the concept was developed to provide staff with faster internet access, for the purpose of banking, social media and emails.
The station, 77 kilometres south east of Yunta and 160km from Burra, is extremely isolated with no mobile phone coverage and limited capacity internet.
Mr Noakes said internet coverage was vital to living in an isolated area.
“There was recognition that we had to provide a service to retain young staff in the bush,” he said.
“We had to provide them with decent access to the internet.
“Given that we didn't have a tower near us, we did quite a large amount of research and found we could get a signal from Nackara, which is 81km away from the homestead.”
To source internet back to the homestead, a linking tower was erected on a hill 27km from the homestead that could pick up signal from Nackara, a further 54km away next to the Barrier Highway.
“There’s a range of hills in the way, and after locating a hill where we got reasonable signal and put the tower on it, we were getting acceptable speeds of 1.5 to 2 megabits a second,” Mr Noakes said.
“On top of the hill we put a linking tower which has an aerial and picks up a mobile signal from Nackara, there’s a dish that transmits the data back to the homestead using the 5 gigahertz unlicensed spectrum.”
Mr Noakes said there was a receiving tower at the homestead with a wireless access point broadcasting the signal to a 300-metre radius around the homestead and three homes.
“We commissioned it last week, it is still provided by Telstra, but a lot faster than what they had provided us with.”
Mr Noakes said the next stage of the wireless project was to monitor water tanks across the property through the use of cameras.
“We would like to think we could monitor all water levels remotely,” he said.