Enmeshed in la la land — part 3
Cantennas by day, Yetis by night
Read the second part of the article here.
“Do you see us? We’re right here on top of this hill!”
“See? No. Hear? yes!”
“What’s the Signal to Noise Ratio?”
“Crystal clear! Can you stop moving the antenna please?”
“This is actually working!”
“Yes, crazy! … Can you get some food on your way back please?”
* * *
Setting up
Samphal-la is a plumber, electrician, farmer, buddhist, ice-stupa builder, father, husband, uncle, brother, and whatever else Zanskar needs him to be. Within a few days after we arrived, he also made it back from Leh to help us with building the mesh network in whatever way he could. The pace of life in Zanskar took some getting used to — The day started for us usually around eight by which time the sun would be up. Me, Ishan and Prasenjit would groggily walk into the living room banging our heads against the low door entrance with surprising regularity. Geshe-la would usually be up well before this time, and would greet us with a cup of hot water. That would be followed by a round of black tea, butter tea and chai tea in no particular order. Breakfast would usually be prepared by Samphal-la or his daughter Tenzin. After this morning ritual, we would make our plan for the day. Like clockwork, by early afternoon, fierce winds accompanied by the occasional sandstorm would force us to resign to whatever shelter was closest at hand. Our initial few days involved visiting a few key places in Zanskar where we would set up the mesh, the first of which would be Karsha gompa.
Built on a steep, serrated rock slope, the stone and mud construction of the monastery is over a thousand years old. Overseeing Karsha village, the monastery is one of the largest in Zanskar, and contains many temples, meditation halls, schools, and residential buildings. We reached the base of the monastery in a vehicle and started making our way up on foot exploring one structure after another. Time acquires a different meaning in a place like this. Sitting in one of the prayer halls, I remember myself trying to date the different elements of that room. The painting on the wall — over 400 years; the wooden pillars — over 150 years; the desk beside me — over a hundred years, the room itself — nobody knows; the monk telling me all this — 23 years. I slowly begin to grasp the length of time that passes from one generation of monks to another, how one place could be continuously inhabited for over a millennium, and why it would come to be considered as sacred. Another structure we walk through is over a hundred and fifty years old with load bearing mud walls easily over a meter wide built to survive winter and time. As we ascend the maze of stairs, rooms, courtyards, we’re greeted with more snacks and chai. Finally we make our way to the very top of the gompa, which houses a temple with a stupa containing mummified remains of a monk. We all silently take this in, and move on to discuss where we might be putting WiFi equipment up in this ancient, sacred, mysterious place.
From Karsha, much of the triangular shaped Zanskar valley is visible. Perched up on our vantage point, we scan the valley for potential sites to reach. Across the river, lying at the base of two huge mountains is Padum village, and it is easy enough to see why its there. Fed by meltwater from two huge glaciers on that mountain, there is enough water in Padum to sustain its irrigation needs. But for how long? As we gaze in awe, Mingyur-la (a monk in Karsha gompa and our to-be technical resource person) tells us how the glacier is receding every year. Earlier this year, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama had visited Zanskar and told them to be aware of the large scale climate changes taking place in their region and make preparatory adjustments. Closer towards us from Padum is a school that showed a lot of interest in our work, and to its right is Men-Tsee-Khang, a Tibetan medicine center. Far to the right of Padum on our side of the river is Langmi, the village where we are staying, and closer towards us in the same direction is SECPAD school, Sandup’s alma mater and another potential site for mesh network access.
In parallel to our initial field surveys, I also setup a mini electronics lab in Samphal-la’s home. We occupy one empty room in his house and organize it so that all tools and inventory is easily accessible.
Erratic power is a constant annoyance to our progress. The moment my soldering iron fights its way through low voltage to get hot enough to melt solder, we have a sudden power cut. Whats worse, every single mesh node’s battery pack and its associated circuitry are badly damaged during shipping, so they must be remade almost from scratch, and much more sturdily than before. This adds to our work. We realize that we need to look for another place for setting up a lab, or perhaps purchase an inverter. We talk to Geshe-la about this and soon enough, he speaks to Namgyal-la, director of SECPAD school and he finds us a room in his school’s hostel building. At first we are a bit hesitant at the thought of moving the lab outside the village, but after seeing that they have a reliable solar powered backup system, we shift there. We also have tens of additional onlookers — curious kids wondering what we’re up-to. Slowly, our work gets up to speed and some confidence builds in our ability to be able to pull this off.
Field testing
After repairing the first few mesh nodes, a critical moment comes — the very first long distance test. Our test setup consists of a domino core based mesh node plus a selection of three antennas on one end which I would hold up from a rooftop in Langmi.
- A simple omni directional antenna, which looks like a little plastic rod sticking out from mass market routers.
- A tin can antenna, or a cantenna, fashioned from old tin cans we found at a scrap dealer.
- A mash up of a cantenna and a mass market satellite-tv antenna. This is our most powerful antenna in terms of directional gain.
On the other end is a satellite tv mashup antenna which Prasenjit, Ishan and Geshe-la took with them across the river near Padum on a little hilltop called Pibiting. An aerial distance of about five kilometers. An additional challenge with tv-dish antennas is that they are off-axis which makes it that much harder to test because the signal that is transmitted is not perpendicular to the antenna’s plane but tilted at an angle. To get around this, we paste a small wooden stick on the rod between the cantenna and the dish to point in in the direction of the transmitted signal.
Soon the big moment comes and all the nervous excitement that has built up over the past few weeks comes to a head at this moment. In all our testing, we hadn’t tested live VoIP calling over such a setup and frankly I’m a bit afraid we’re going to run into problems. We set a rough time when we will begin the test at both ends as fallback if communication completely fails. At the appointed hour, I make my way up to the roof of Samphal-la’s home. I stand holding two phones in my hand — one, an old nokia feature phone connected to the 2G network in the area, and the other, a smartphone connected to my end of the mesh network over wifi. As I adjust the dish I hold to point it in the general direction of Pibiting, and fiddle with my nokia phone to call Prasenjit over GSM, I receive a call on the other phone! I pick it up, and like magic, I hear his voice — clear, noise free, unblemished. Before we actually grasp the depth of what just happened, we pass the phone around so that the local zanskari people with us in the moment also get to experience what just happened. I get to speak with Geshe-la, and I can’t but help sense a bit of shock in his voice — It’s as if he is expressing ‘I can hear Anish’s voice from five kilometers away using equipment built from discarded batteries, throwaway tin cans and satellite-tv dishes on a shoestring budget.’ In a moment, the prospect of a long distance mesh network becomes a real possibility! Measurements of signal quality and strength are beyond impressive.
After this eureka moment, we realign our plans to seriously start thinking about deployment. I focus next on building a large battery pack for the Intel NUC based internet-in-a-box, and we discuss deployment details. Moving from handheld antennas to installed infrastructure.
Roll-out
We make a deployment plan after meeting various people in the different villages we intend to provide mesh connectivity to. There will be two primary backbones of the network — one between Karsha and Padum, and the other between Karsha and Langmi. Later, if time and inventory allows, we might consider a link between Langmi and Padum so that the network can start more accurately resemble mesh topology. The job of these primary routers would be to forward packets to other mesh nodes, but not directly to users. A number of secondary mesh nodes would be installed to facilitate that, which would mesh with these primary nodes and also provide a WiFi access point to users. Me and Ishan focus more on this work, while Prasenjit starts thinking about media collections on the NUC.
For me and Ishan, the next few days are spent mostly outdoors. We wake up earlier than usual, make a plan for the day, go to our lab in SECPAD, pick up equipment, and be on our way. During this time, assistance from Samphal-la, Mingyur-la and Angdus-ji, a school teacher in Zanskar and our neighbour in Langmi, is invaluable. They help us acquiring the materials necessary to secure the mesh node dishes with a cement foundation, find carpenters who can create boxes for us, and generally give us tips on how to best secure the things we are installing. It was heart-warming to see them take ownership where they feel they understand the task well enough, and remain curious to know more about what they don’t.
Through the next couple of weeks, we go about installing one mesh node after another. Work is tiring but rewarding. Prasenjit writes scripts that helps to monitor the state of the network and log it over time — which might provide invaluable insight when we look back at this project. We suffer a bit from mission creep as we discover there is far more interest in the mesh network than we had imagined. From time to time, Geshe-la comes to us asking whether it would be possible to setup another node in some place or another, and we have to constantly re-evaluate our plan balancing short term deployment over long term sustainability. We feel hard at times that we have to push back against such requests because we want to first evaluate performance, and only then commit to a broader performance. At the same time, we work hard to improve media and user interaction on the internet-in-a-box. Prasenjit figures out how to make searchable collections of content with the resources that we have available, and we go about replacing simple file listings on blank web pages with a proper web interface. Ishan designs a beautiful homepage and microsite in wordpress that replaces the conventional IIAB frontpage. He searches within the content that’s already on the IIAB to find thumbnails, photos, detailed descriptions and stirs up a compelling user interface we are all very impressed with. With Geshe-la’s help, we also make a Tibetan-language version of that website, and he also uploads many Tibetan and Buddhist texts onto the IIAB.
During the last days of our stay, we organize a mesh workshop and invite about ten people whom we interacted with through the summer to do a step by step walk-through of everything that’s been done. The purpose of this is to both do a knowledge transfer, and build a spirit of ownership. We are very stretched for time and are only able to do this over one afternoon; something that I’m afraid we should have devoted more time to with the benefit of hindsight. Still, we feel confident enough that the mesh will work for at least some time, and already have an impressive collection of statistics collected over our final two weeks in Zanskar.
* * *
It was a quiet and starry night…
… and all of us were in Langmi celebrating the retirement and homecoming of a Zanskari man employed in the Indian army. It was our first experience of a communal evening in Zanskar. With a background of traditional drums and an instrument resembling the shehnai, there were locals singing and dancing in flowing motions. Men sat lining the edges of the tent, while the women sat in the middle. Generous amounts of liquor was served to the point of us being force fed! While the locals wanted to try out Beer, Whiskey and Rum brought from the outside, we were more interested in the locally brewed chang (barley-beer) and arak (distilled barley spirit). We discovered that in Zanskar, social drinking is not taboo at all unlike many other places in India. We even saw parents encouraging kids to try out a bit of chang. Angdus-ji gave us company and helped us better understand what was happening. We saw an entire village come together without inhibition to celebrate the return of one their own, and got a deeper understanding of the kind of culture that has allowed these people to survive, thrive over millennia in such a remote place. We went back tired, full and happy.
…until next evening, when we were summoned again. Apparently, that same Zanskari man’s son was getting engaged, and joke was that we all needed to regather to finish all the leftover food and alcohol from last night, otherwise there would be yet another party the following evening. Prasenjit and Ishan were too tired after a hard day’s work, so I gave Angdus-ji company. We sat in a different corner of the tent this time, and while the crowd was a bit thinner than last night, the celebrations weren’t. Soon after dinner was served, the to be bride and groom emerged and quickly laden with a zillion khatas (white silk scarves) by everyone present. While all this was happening, gossip was spreading that a mountain bear had made its way into the village looking for food! When I returned back, Prasenjit and Ishan were still awake and when I told them the news about the bear, they said back to me — ‘oh so that’s what that sound we heard could have been — we were too scared to go out and check’.
We learn of more mountain bear stories. Known locally as Yetis, they are not all that uncommon a visitor in many of the villages here. One such story was quite incredible; A mother bear and her young one came to the village looking for food. The mother bear picked up her cub and pushed it through the window of a house where it went in and was enjoying itself. Soon, villagers learnt about this and started making noise, the young cub in panic couldn’t come out, and the mother in desperation broke the door of the house and both of them ran away! Despite all this, wildlife isn’t hunted for game in any part of Zanskar. People recognize that a bear or a wolf or a snow leopard is as much a part of nature as they are, and they are all trying to survive and co-exist.
* * *
Soon enough, with deep gratitude, our stay in Zanskar would come to an end; but the time to introspect, learn, build, grow would come. Still, we had the small matter of returning from this quiet, hidden, beautiful, peaceful, loving place…
Stay tuned for part-4.
