Friday, February 16, 2007

Technical difficulties

We had heavy rain here in Iraq last night, and I wasn't able to get a good satellite connection to upload pictures (4000ms ping times and 95% packet loss for the geeks reading this).

We also had to do the television upload in a non-standard way, and apparently the audio was lost in transmission. Maybe weather related, maybe operator error...

Not to worry... we will resend everything again later today. Along with today's stuff.

Today is my last day in Fallujah, a day earlier than planned due lack of open helicopter flights tomorrow. But I still have a ton of additional photos and lots of stuff to write about, so stay tuned for the next week or two...

UPDATE: The clouds went away, and we have a sunny afternoon, and my satellite modem is working great. Moral of the story: BGAN does NOT work in rain or heavy clouds, and loves clear skies (1500ms ping times now, and 8% packet loss... MUCH happier). Photo upload in progress.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is great for families to understand from another point of view. So, no worries when your soldier can't get back to you right away, these inconveniences happen all the time! In a land far off, when a weather change can take technology off the map for a little while or the heat simply blows out those generators in the summer heat or just one additional electronic device (aka.microwave) turning on makes the rest suffer no lights for a few hours.

Anonymous said...

Looking forward to more photos and text during the next few weeks. Maybe you have a book in the making! Also, we are thrilled to see your KSTP reports.

Day by Day, by Chris Muir (updated daily)



Chris Muir is the cartoonist that I met in Kuwait. He spent two weeks in Iraq at the same time I was there in February 2007, and so thought it would relevant to showcase his work on my site. Here is a link to Chris' humorous travelogue of this Iraq trip: http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/03/arrival_alignright_v.php