In support of new station Radio Beeray.

The village is nice, sprawling alongside a river with a couple of trees and the dunes behind it. But it is hot, very hot, even in the rainy season. It was a refreshing sensation to feel the light wind blow in Tombouctou at 40°C … The only power supply in Bourem Inaly is the 55W solar panels that are installed on the rooftops of some houses; two were installed by Geekcorps at the new radio station, which now has a total of five panels. No electricity means no cool water, no ice (and no ice cream), no fridge, no fans, no air conditioning. So the only time you cool down is nighttime, when you sleep outside, where the mosquitoes lurk (luckily, this far north you don’t have to worry about malaria).

The food in the village is sufficient, but not exactly a balanced diet. We ate rice two or three times a day, and bread for breakfast. We drank water or milk made from powder. There seemed to be no fruit.

After a brief meeting with the mayor, we spent the first day doing all the hardware installations: connecting the solar panels to the car batteries and laying the cables to the power consumers, for example, the RBGAN modem for the Internet connection, the computer for the radio studio, and the TV-sharing system for all the villagers.

The studio computer was specially designed for this harsh desert environment. It is a fanless system in the form factor Mini-ITX. Normally, it consumes only 35W, including the screen, with a peak value of 60W, which makes it suitable for being powered by low energy sources like solar panels.

If the passive cooling with the heatpipe proves to be too feeble, an external fan can be attached to the side of the enclosure. (The fan is bound to succumb to the ubiquitous dust and sand quickly, so an external fan is easier to maintain for the local staff than an internal one.) Also, the magnetic hard disk was replaced by a solid state disk, which means that there are basically no moving parts in the system. Because solid state disks’ cells can only be written to a limited number of times, our homebrew Linux, Kunnafonix, was adjusted to limit disk writes.

The major installations were finished by 10:00 p.m., after which we all collapsed on mattresses laid out in the courtyard of the town hall.

The next two and a half days consisted of training the radio staff and fine-tuning the hardware installations, which included antenna orientation and position, and proper cable layout. The staff — two technicians, two journalists, the director and the secretary of the mayor — had little to no experience with computers, so we had to explain things several times. Sometimes there also seemed to be a problem of language, where the staff did not completely grasp the meaning of the French words used. But finally, it seemed they were able to use all their new gadgets: word processing with OpenOffice, audio mixing with Audacity, web browsing with Firefox, emailing with Squirrelmail, and using the MP3 player/voice recorder Megastick for recording interviews in the streets.

With this computer, the web is not browsed in the usual fashion, because the connection to the Internet via RBGAN is very, very expensive (paid by the kilobyte). To reduce the number of kilobytes transferred, all graphics are disabled and loband is used to further trim down the amount of data. Some sites do not work with loband (yet), especially sites which make heavy use of JavaScript, like webmail services. For their email, the Bourem Inaly staff connect to Squirrelmail on a local web server. The mail is then sent and received with the local postfix mail server via UUCP to Geekcorps’ mail server, which takes care of the rest.

We were also able to get the big TV and satellite dish up and running, which led to regular gatherings at the radio station in the evening. The system needed an extraordinary amount of inrush current, which blew out fuses in the solar power controller, so the TV had never actually been used before.

In the end, everyone was tired, but happy, and we will be excited to see their progress when Geekcorps returns to Bourem Inaly to evaluate the usage of the systems.

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