Two steps forward, six steps back. I got email flowing again (which was primarily 900+ messages from programs, all informing me that the network was down.) Then John came over and fixed up the power-over-ethernet stuff; then we did some random screwing around with the transmitters and network interfaces and actually made some pretty major performance improvements, and it seemed like we were actually webcasting successfully over the wireless link... when after one change, the box at the other end of the link stopped responding. So Tom met us at UnitedLayer in the middle of the night, and we went up on the roof and messed with the box in person. As far as we can tell, it's just plain dead. We don't know why. The lights are on, but nobody's home. So tomorrow it's another day, another two hundred bucks as we buy a new transmitter. "Yay."

It keeps feeling like we're 95% of the way to getting this wireless link working, but then I remember that once we've actually seen decent performance for more than ten minutes at a stretch, we're still going to have to contend with all sorts of other things, like fog, rain, and pigeon shit. We're probably more like 20% done.

Normally I would have given up on this long ago, because it's just so damned sketchy, but the sad truth is, it's our best option. We can either get this working, or we can be totally offline for two or three weeks.