Firstly, thank you to all those who tried to contact us on the narrowboat and those who just followed and read the thread. We successfully connected outbound but as has been discussed, others could not establish a connection with us. On two occasions we had two-way communication after I had established a connection, on Friday Michael replied, "Hi John" before we lost connection. It was a start!
On Saturday I managed to catch Sean and we had a short two-way conversation.
The ChatGPT service worked ok, and I'm sure if I had had my PIN I could have sent an email. But inbound was not working but it would eventually become clear that this was part of a wider problem with inbound connections.
Our movement along the canal was causing intermittent Network access which was frustrating the problem and on Sunday we had a few long tunnels and hills around us which didn't help. To help with this we put my phone in a waterproof container on the boat roof (with a tether!)
So we had some success but i would like to make some changes to try and fix the 'incoming over mobile network' problem. Detlef has suggested some changes which i need to try but we ran out of time to try it on the boat. I plan to do some experimentation with this to see if i can get some reliable inbound connections.
We did have fun with the unit on the boat, the Telex had a presence, because it took up a fair amount of space and because when it was running it was very engaging and even some of the less enthusiastic friends on board seemed to be excited when it burst into life, even if it was just telling us we had lost connection to the server.
I will post some photos of the Telex on the boat and in action shortly. If we have success with the experiments to change settings for mobile use, I may consider trying to talk my very patient friends into trying this again!
On Sunday, a reporter heard about our Telex mission and came to talk to us about it at the boatyard. A story may appear in a publication at some point!
And we also visited the decommissioned bunker at Hack Green which had lots of interesting equipment including lots of Creed 444s!
We will check the incoming connections prior to taking the system mobile.
