Video

You must have Microsoft Windows Media player to view the cam. When you open the webpage the video should start loading. You will see text at the bottom of the player that says that the video is buffering and it will show the completion percentage.  Please give it 20-30 seconds to load.  If you see that the buffering has frozen and is not moving, you can hit the stop button on the media player and then the start button. The video should start. During our drive, there will be locations where we dont have a signal and we may lose the video for short times. If you don't get the video please just stand by and it should start.  Also there will be times where it looks like the picture stops. This will be normal. Please give it 15-20 seconds to see if it starts back up by itself.  While we are driving it is very difficult to get the video to the server and we will probably be transmitting at times with very low bandwidth.  This means that the picture might not be very clear or sharp at times.  Once we are in Dayton or other cities, it is probable that we will be able to run much higher bandwidth and send you pretty good quality pictures.  The new windows media now allows us to transmit high quality audio with the video. We may turn the audio off  from time during our 10 hour drive.(you probably would not want to listen to us talk for 10 hours)

If you are interested in looking at the statistics of the video transmission, you can right click over the video picture and that will bring up a information box that will tell you the speed, frames per second, quality, etc. You can also from the right click, select the zoom function of the picture and even make it full screen if you like.  If you do go to full screen the picture quality will be less.  To get back to normal size from full screen, just hit your "Esc" key on your keyboard.

You must also have Java installed on your PC to see and use the chat room. You can get Java free and download it at http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp.  To use the chat, enter your name or your call sign in the box that says "your nickname" then hit the connect button. You don't need a password.  Within about 10 seconds this will bring you into the chat room. you will be able to see all the other people and chat with them. Just enter your comments in the line next to the colored blocks and hit enter.  You will see your comments posted. If you like, you can open a new full page chat window by going to http://lhcw.net/hamradio. Please don't use bad language and use courtesy .  We do have the capabilities to kick people off or ban them completely from the chat room

We are using windows media encoder 9 on a laptop with a camera. The camera is mounted under the mirror in the front windshield.  From time to time we will rotate it around to give a view inside the car.  We will also be using a cam mounted on a helmet (called the helmet cam). You can see a picture of it on this page.  The laptop has a wireless network card.  We are using Verizon's national broadband access. We have added an external 6db antenna outside the car and have also inserted a 2 watt amplifier. The freq is CDMA around 1850-1900 Mhz.  In broadband areas like Dayton and Memphis, you can get 180K bursts upload and about 700K download speeds.  On the road outside the broadband cities, we will have slower speeds like 50k upload and 100k download.   While traveling between cities, the connection speed may drop low and we may be transmitting video as low as 30Kbps but it is possible to transmit in some areas much higher (100Kbps)  The signal strength will determine what speed and quality we transmit at.  Since the laptop is going to have limited bandwidth, we send that video stream back to a Media Server.  This server is connected to the internet with a very high capacity uplink.  When you access the web page, you will be watching video directly from our media server.  If we are able to get a 100K stream connection from the laptop to the server, then all of you will be able to watch video at the 100K rate.  You can see the importance of the server now.  Say if we have 300 viewers on at the same time, each would be using 100K of uplink bandwidth.  so 300x100K = the need for a 30 Mbit uplink connection to the internet.   Hopefully while in Dayton at hamvention, we will have high speed connection and can up the video speed to 100k or better.