Jonni, from Finland, is a long time volunteer with HEF. His first project was building a Finnish sauna in the village several years ago. The sauna provides health benefits along with relaxation for hard working villagers and volunteers. He was in Nepal this past October to work on the sauna and several wireless-dependent meteorological projects with Mahabir:
“I cleaned the sauna stove thoroughly, which had rust and ash from moisture. We made a new chimney for it. The old one was simple and broken, and I think rain could get in. Ash must be removed regularly so it does not absorb moisture that must greatly accelerate corrosion. The new chimney was built of rock, with a large flat rock on top and holes on the sides of it.”
“I went to Mohare Danda, Khopra, Khayer lake and Larke, to install equipment for Mahabir These were: an IP camera to Mohare, weather station to Khopra and repairs in Larke.”
“Shortly put: the camera in Mohare Danda is useful for several purposes. The destination can be advertised better, and Mahabir is thinking of puttinga screen with live video from the camera in the Nepal Connection Café in Thamel. The installation trip took 4 days. We wanted to protect the camera from weather, but the installation and cabling were problematic – we had to use parts that were available in Mohare, so there were several improvisations, like using a water tank lid for roof, and a part of an Ethernet cable for power. Also, Dept. of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) was interested in making weather observations about cloudiness from these images. The images are stored at:
* http://www.nepalwireless.net/webcams/mohare/
In Khopra, I was to install a small Vaisala weather station. Vaisala calls this product a “weather transmitter”, as it’s not a fully functioning station, but Mahabir calls it a “weather station”. Difference is: The transmitter does not log values, and also it isn’t fully equipped to measure all things. It cannot measure snowfall at all, and it has everything in one box which makes accurate measurements difficult because wind measurement should be at 10 meter height and temperature at 2 meters.”
“When in Khopra, I found that the communication part was defective, and after despair, found out that the laptop in Khopra could be used for this purpose. We had additional installation and transmission errors that have rendered this project of little use for now. There’s no data for the night, and if there’s also mostly no data for the day, there’s just not much data at this time but we will work on correcting the errors.”
“In Larke, there are old installations – both a camera like the one in Mohare, and a weather station like in Khopra. Both were not functioning. We just took that down and brought to Pokhara for repairs. I could fix the weather station, as its only problem was the transmission of data. I set up a new transmission and the results can be seen at a link below. This is interesting for the aviation to Jomsom, and also for DHM.”
* http://www.nepalwireless.net/weather/larke/index.html
“On my trip, I also visited DHM to increase understanding and prepare for possible future collaboration between DHM and the Finnish Meteorology
Institute.”
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