Missing wifi key - do you have it?

As many people in the UK and elsewhere adjust to finding themselves confined to their homes during the developing coronavirus pandemic, thoughts will undoubtedly turn to ways to keep ourselves occupied and sane when we can't get out and about.

It has long been understood that access to wildlife and to the outdoors has a significant, demonstrable impact on our mental and physical well-being (see here, here, here and here). And so, finding ourselves constrained from travelling or coming together with like-minded souls to experience the natural environment may be a challenge for many people.

For our own part, the Derby Cathedral Peregrine Project has, over the years, received many messages from people who were ill or housebound and unable to travel to get their 'fix' of nature. For them, using webcameras like ours offered a very special opportunity to watch and enjoy wildlife from home. For some it was a real lifeline to nature. And so it is now more important than ever before that we provide as many of these opportunities for safe enjoyment of wildlife whilst so many of us are considering self-isolating to avoid the spread of this horrible virus. 

Worm Purple technicians installing a Siklu
wireless link on a streetside column
on Irongate.

Over the last few months we have been inching back towards restoring our webcamera connections. Thanks to Tim at Derby City Council IT department, and to Mark at Worm Purple, we now have a pair of wireless units mounted and ready to link our equipment inside Derby Cathedral's tower equipment to the internet. One unit has been set up inside the clockroom of the tower, whilst its partner is mounted on a council-owned column in the street below. We know they work and are ready to go. But...

...there was still one small but critically important problem left to surmount. The key could not be found!

No, this isn't the wifi key or 'password' needed to set up the wifi units - it's the actual, physical key needed to unlock one side of the base of the column so that the network/PoE cables can be plugged in to complete the link and power up the Siklu transmitter unit.  For the last two weeks they've been asking high and low to see who at the Council has it. And now, we hear, it might have been found, and we shall know in the next day or so if it has.

Once we do, we can complete the re-configuring the new equipment to send a video stream to our webcam-hosting company, and from there direct to your PC, wherever in the world that may be.  Whether we shall be in a safe enough position by mid-May to run watchpoints on the Cathedral Green, it is simply impossible to say at his stage in the pandemic. But with some of the UK's peregrines already having laid their first egg of the season, making that final internet connection for our webcameras - so that we can all watch them from home - can not come soon enough.

Nick M.
for Peregrine Project Team.