Western Railroad Discussion > Dunsmuir Cam detox

Don't know about the rest of you folks, but was wondering if the sun has come up in Dunsmuir lately? Todd, I know the equipment is old and the building (Historic Cab forward shed) could be torn down at any moment, but has good-ol Trainorders thought about a more reliable Cam? I can suggest another location and will go as far as offering to contact people I know that can be a new host in the lower yard. Just thought I'd offer...
Dave

In fact Dave one of the towns Council Persons asked me if Dunsmuir still had its Railcam and I just replied "Yea when it works". Im not an electronic genius but it cant be that complicated to keep it working. Even if you have to make it a more basic operation at least it would work. I can watch a live video view of Peregrine Falcons in Derby England rain or shine twenty four hours a day but I cant watch trains that pass my front door.

Maybe on the sanding towers in the lower yard, oops. If it goes south of the Cemetery it's not in Dunsmuir anymore, maybe the County can help out.
Can you say Siskiyou Cam?

Back on-line this am for the rail-grinder.

Seems to be MOW season, there was another dedicated train in town on Saturday, not sure where it went.

TCnR Wrote:
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> Back on-line this am for the rail-grinder.
>
Life is good...

I’m not sure what technology Todd is using on these web cams… DSL, cable, satellite, carrier pigeons, etc… but no matter what the technology is, there’s always going to be some (most) installations that work great and a few that have nothing but trouble. I retired as a technician from a phone company and there were always a few circuits that seemed to always have troubles. I was often given the task of fixing these chronic problems and many times I would give the customer my direct number to call when there was a problem. The worst ones seemed to be the intermittent problems (like the Dunsmuir cam is experiencing). Sometimes the problem would clear up before the circuit could be tested. “I’m sorry sir but I can’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” I’ve gone as far as having a technician sit at the customer’s location to wait for the thing to break. The managers didn’t care for that but when the customer complained a little louder the manager ask me who I wanted them to send.

As an example of how difficult some of the troubles can be, I had a customer with at 56KB/s data circuit (that was about 20 years ago when 56KB/s was fast) that was very intermittent. It might break 3 or 4 times a day or it might go 3 weeks without a problem. We changed the cable pairs going to the customer, changed the inside wiring, the terminating equipment at the customers location, all of the plug-in cards that were on the circuit, assigned the circuit to new time slots in the carrier equipment. We changed just about everything other than the color of the customers building. Nothing seemed to help. We finally got the circuit fixed when we located another circuit on the multiplexer that was causing the trouble. All but one of the 20 plus customers on that multiplexer were having troubles but no one else was reporting it since the outage usually cleared before they could even get it reported. BTW, the one that was not having trouble was the circuit that was causing all of the other circuits to fail. We called them “killer channels.”

I’m sure Todd is working on the problem, or has someone working on it for him. I offer my comments as an insight to how difficult some problems can be. The trouble seems to be intermittent and that can make it a real challenge. Let’s just hope it’s fixed soon.

John

Just for info the D-Cam is located about 4 short blocks from the Phone Company building. I heard they were very proud of the lines into the building but I don't have the technical details. I also heard the phone line wasn't the issue, more along the battery back-ups and power supplies. My $0.02 would say that building is not an ideal test bed since it has no center ridge on the roof and it's inhabited by pigeons, with all that goes with a flock of pigeons. It is in a nice location though.