John Whitby - Astronomy Enthusiast

John Whitby often spends the night looking at the stars. No, this isn’t a case of wistfulness but rather a passion for astronomy and in particular showing people the wonders of the southern night sky which he does by broadcasting what he is viewing as a real-time, high-resolution video image.

“I have been broadcasting for about a year now, people from all over the world are watching. I have a headset with a mic and I can tell them what I’m looking at. They can type-chat back with questions and comments. It’s great.”

John is a man of many skills. He runs his own commercial mowing business and is also well known locally for his forty year career as a practitioner and teacher of karate. Having caught the astronomy bug after buying his son a 4-inch refracting telescope he decided to go the whole hog and he bought a much larger 12-inch reflector research telescope. He has had a huge learning curve. He describes the astronomers he has met as being “like the black belts and I’m just the beginner”.

He has plenty of high-tech equipment all housed on a viewing platform that John designed and built himself so that he could get above the trees. As well as the telescope itself the other crucial piece of equipment is a special video camera which was hand-made in America by the quirkily-named, Rock Mallin. The camera provides extremely high resolution images in colour.

“Without WIZ I couldn’t actually broadcast. The system requires a minimum of 1 Mbps upload speed. We used to have a satellite account but the upload speed was way too slow. With WIZ I can get upload speeds of up to 4Mbps.”

John’s enthusiasm is palpable: “One night recently I was viewing the Tarantula nebula, it was a really clear night, the image and the internet speed was so good that people thought it looked 3-D. It was incredible. Man, it was magic!”

John’s enthusiasm is palpable: “One night recently I was viewing the Tarantula nebula, it was a really clear night, the image and the internet speed was so good that people thought it looked 3-D. It was incredible. Man, it was magic!”

Read John's story

George and Sarah Tatham

“We barely had dial-up” Sarah says jokingly “we could be doing the banking and the speed would slow down to nothing and we’d have to start again.” ...

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Neville and Jenny Rosengren

“The real estate agent said there was a local broadband business who might be able to help so we rang WIZwireless”....

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Stu and Jan Fergusson

“We have a heavy emphasis on research, both for product development and for sussing out the market, and we need a good internet service. We simply weren’t able to do all the research and development work that we’re doing now before we had WIZwireless.”

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Clive Thompson

“We used to have Telecom broadband but WIZwireless is a lot faster. We’ve had it for about two years now, it was easily set up and it has never given us any grief,” Clive says.

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Becks Tosswill

Becks explains.
“If I didn’t have the fast internet here I simply couldn’t run my design business. The internet is important for doing research and for sending files to clients and suppliers.

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