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Weather Balloons & Wireless
mansa writes "Over at CNN they have an article about a company that wants to expand wireless coverge with weather balloons! I hope it's not just a bunch of hot air! "
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Is that really close enough to provide a decent signal? And more importantly (too me, anyway) is there anyway this could be rigged up to provide wireless internet access, 802.11b or otherwise?
The article also says that 70 balloons are released every two days. I have wonder if 70 balloons is really going to cover all of America like they hope it will.
Every time I read one of these pie in the sky (or balloon in this case) stories, I can't believe the reporter didn't ask what I'd think would be the basic question: What is all this junk going to end up?
We've had environmentalist complaints about PCs and all the toxic components they possess. Now some not-yet-defunct VC is pushing disposal cell sites and nobody's curious? What about when a 747 sucks one of these floating cell sites into an engine? And they complain about use of personal electronics on the plane...
Heck, in high school we were told we couldn't launch balloon projects anymore (you know, where you'd put a note on it and ask the finder to call you and let you know where it ended up at) because the environmentalists said some sea critters mistook the deflated balloons for fish, ate them and choked to death.
So where's the uproar from the ELF/ALF folks?
*scoove*
The article states that the balloons were launched day in, day out. What about the poor weather days where the wind is gusty and fast? Does the cell coverage on those days get lost?
Over the summer (in the southern hemisphere), I worked to help launch ozone measuring balloons, (same idea, more equipment), and we launched them only in fairly calm conditions. A balloon full of hydrogen is a fairly scary prospect when it's getting blown around. Does this also mean a commercial company will be putting extra pressure on the NWS to launch in potentially unsafe conditions? Scary thought!
A friend of mine who does some work for NASA was describing another wacky concept he heard about to expand wireless coverage. The idea is that enough commercial planes are in the air at any moment, and are spaced evenly enough, to provide coverage for much of the country. Certainly major cities would be well covered. And the nice thing is that busy travel times coincide with peak calling hours.
...using free-floating weather balloons has a number of limitations and disadvantages.
Now we know that NASA has great plans for its solar-powered airplane -- including acting as a semi-permanent flying repeater-station, but I wonder if smaller, cheaper options might not be available.
For example... what about a much smaller (say 20-30 foot span) autonomous craft designed to soar thermals during the day (while charging its batteries and gaining as much altitude as it can) -- then revert to battery power and/or gradually descend during the hours of darkness.
If the energy required to keep these craft airborn in the longer nights of winter was greater than that availble to be stored during the day then they could carry a fuel-load to power a high-efficiency internal combustion engine (probably a very small diesel engine). Every week or so the craft would have to land for refueling and maintenance -- but that's not a big deal.
Just like the US military's Predator RPV, they could be programmed to land on a runway set aside specially for the purpose.
The cost of a smaller craft, particularly one that wasn't totally reliant on solar-cells, would likely be much less than NASA's efforts -- thus allowing more of them to be built for a given budget.
By using more craft, they could cruise at a much lower altititude than either the weather balloon or the NASA craft.
Using modern composites, low cost GPS, and other "affordable" technologies, such a craft could likely be built for less than US$10K.
Assuming a 50% duty cycle, a fleet of 10 craft could cover a huge area at a much lower cost than towers, and with the ability to dynamically vary the coverage area if required -- simply by repositioning the craft.
100,000 feet / 186,000 ft/sec = 0.53 * 2 = 1.075 second round trip. Quake would definitely suck. It would be annoying to have an extra second built into every link you click on, but that would probably be livable.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Why on earth don't these idiots approach all of the major airlines and mount the boxes to all airplanes. The airlines could charge for the usage and boost their profits. Think of how many airplanes are in the air over the usa at any given moment. Now the trick part is to design a cheap phased array antenna for the client side radio.
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