Slashdot Mirror
Airships Tested As Two-Way Telecom Beacons
sgups writes "The Toronto Star (no registration required:)) is reporting about this firm which will supply spherical airships that will be used as high-flying telecommunications platforms to supply two-way Internet access across the United States and into Mexico and Canada. The article explains little of the technology though."
I thought that the .Bomb went out in 2000 or so. Why's this shit being regurgitated when I saw the same stuff in a 1998 computer magazine.
Hint: The company who had the original idea tanked.
It'd be rather like a large helium-filled balloon, tethered, with a 5-watt 2M rig and a TNC, possibly powered by a battery/solar cell combination. Put a bunch of these up, and you've got it (albeit slow as heck).
:) Just like Field Day, all year long.
Now, make it a dual-band unit, and run it much faster than a normal TNC. Have the up and downlinks to the subscribers on one channel, and the "between units" link on another one. That should help the speed, and allow for greater coverage as well.
I think it'd be fun
Lemon curry?
RTA: they are putting these up in the stratosphere which is above the part of the atmosphere where weather is a problem.
-- the cake is a lie
The new homeland security department will require a massive global network. But transoceanic fiber is easily cut and the $800 million TDRS replenishment program with three satellites doesn't have the bandwidth. Intercepted SIGINT data is reportedly transmitted to Earth on a 24 GHz downlink using narrow-beam antennas. But the frequency swaths allocated for links are less than consumers can get on cable television. More bandwidth is needed.
One might speculate that a secret optical/IR satellite network downlinked in Hawaii might be developed. The European Space Agency, not to be outdone, says they're thinking of building miniaturised optical systems that fit onto a microchip. These optical networks might use optical CDMA which encodes each pulse,across a segment of wavelengths.
As I understand it, solar, with fuel cells for power storage for night. Just like satellites.
Of course, there would need to be an electric fan to keep it in position... perhaps much like electric fans used on ultra-high-flying experimental aircraft.
Also, note the high altitude - above cloud cover... so light is plentiful (good!)... but winds are high too (bad!).
This is, hopefully, much cheaper than geosync satellites. PLUS you can bring them down for maintenence (unlike geosync). So therefore, the machines can be less redundant (read "expensive") than satellite technology.
Sounds like a great solution if they can successfully keep them in place. If cheap enough, this technology could replace the need for ALL large radio towers. (Those towers ain't cheap either, you know)
Although I hesitate due to the high liklihood of it being Slashdotted, the company's homepage has a pretty cool picture of the device in question. While the most of the comm gear is hidden within, you can see some antennae's and solar panels on the side. The rest of the site has lots of other interesting pics, but like the article is unfortunately very short of any tech detail. :-/
thunderstorms in Oklahoma typicaly top out at 50,000ft however they have been known to go to 65,000 ft. 19km is 62kft. The jet stream is at the top of the stratosphere, right below the stratopause which tends to be at 150,000 ft. They have a long way to go to get out of the "weather".
However, given the current state of the telecom industry, I find it hard to believe that *any* of these projects will get off the ground (no pun intended) in the near future.
As to casting a shadow the brightness of the sky (much less the sun) quickly fades out any shadow; the same as high-flying planes don't cast visible shadows (unlike low-altitude ones near airports.)
Any environmental effects of these would be very minimal, far less then those of a conventional plane or helicopter.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually, the problem with the hydrogen airships WASN'T the hydrogen. It was the coating used on the skin that burned so well.
TODO: Something witty here...
That would be what the solar powered motors would be there for. These are also flying above the jetstream. It's not perfectly calm up there, but at that height you can get blown a few miles off course and noone should suffer an interupt in services, just as long as you can fly back to the center of your zone. they're also designed to stay up there for only a year at a time, before coming down for servicing. most of the equiplent can be recycled, but for saftey reasons they would want to replace the parts that take the most wear and tear. Oh, and being round helps too -- remember the payload rides Inside the sphere. being a near-perfect sphere they have the least possible wind drag from any direction in a lighter-than-airship. remember wind is unpredictable, which is why a cigar shaped airship has such a hard time in wind -- it can only handle winds head or tail on. any other direction and it's causing more turbulence than can be handled for precise handling.
Yes these will work, and they're a great idea.
the millitary is also interested in these for deploying the benefits of a satelite over the battlefield without the cost, and with 365 times the flight duration of strotospheric planes.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Pretty much everybody in this thread has these definitions screwed up.
Aircraft are divided into airplanes, rotorcraft, gliders, airships and balloons.
An airship is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has mechanical propulsion; a balloon is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has no propulsion of its own.
Airships are divided into dirigibles (synonymous with zeppelins) and blimps. Dirigibles have internal frames for rigidity; blimps have only the internal gas pressure for rigidity.
There has never been a spherical airship before, and I'm somewhat at a loss as to why anyone would build such a thing; controlling it would be a bitch. So if these things do come to pass, they will be sui generis.
The word "dirigible" causes some confusion, because it does indeed mean steerable in Latin, and blimps are certainly steerable; however, the aviation community decided to use "dirigible" as a synonym for "zeppelin" back when World War I had made German names unpopular. The Hindenburg was a dirigible/zeppelin; Goodyear has blimps.
rj
With a blimp, the end going into the cellular network must also be wireless. What you've then introduced is a wireless repeater, which consumes twice the bandwidth compared to a land-based tower.
The angles at which land-based towers transmit allows its beams to penetrate windows for indoor coverage. A blimp that flies higher would not be able to penetrate several floors (or even just ordinary roofing) to provide the same coverage, especially right underneath itself.
If the blimp cannot be kept stationary enough for doppler sync purposes, then you'll need significantly more complex software to deal with the fact that both the blimp and the handset are moving.
Not impossible, but there are significant obstacles.