The world-renowned Kruger National Park, situated in South Africa, consists of nearly 2 million hectares of unrivalled diversity. It offers a wildlife experience that ranks with the best in Africa.
Mobile phone coverage in Kruger National Park is patchy. There is concentrated coverage in the south of the park, with concentrated spots in the central and northern regions – leaving some sizable gaps in between. We have been approached by an animal tracking and anti-poaching team that work in remote areas in the park that need better mobile data signal to do their work.
Due to the irregular mobile coverage the team can sometimes only communicate with Voice Notes on WhatsApp to get messages through when there are flickering’s of signal. They have to create a hotspot with a phone and link laptop to send reports to the head office and all of this must happen through a secure link. This often does not work, and they must drive +- 100 kms to the Wimpy (South African fast-food restaurant) in Mbombela to upload reports etc.
POYNTING Antennas supplied them with a Teltonika RUT240 that they connect to a 12 V Battery with and inverter. They connected two of our high gain LPDA-92 antennas to the router and mounted these at the top of a 6m segmented mast. These antennas were pointed in a southern direction towards the Vodacom mast at Skukuza, the administrative headquarters and the “Capital city” of the Kruger National Park.
In the screen shots attached the difference in speed when using the router and antennas is significant. Download speeds improved from 1.86 Mbps to 18.93 Mbps and upload speeds from 0.48 Mbps to 13.14 Mbps.
