This is a pipe dream. Hydrogen is a crappy energy storage medium. High pressures make it dangerous and as the AC points out, PEM fuel cells have crappy power production rates. I'll be amazed if we ever see anything flying.
Remote site, no infrastructure, high reliability required, etc. We started with bare rock on the side of a channel on the northern BC coast. The only viable option to survive rain fade was C band. So now you're dealing with a 2.4m dish. Operational requirements called for 3Mb of symmetrical bandwidth which needs a 40W BUC. Leads nicely into the next point; power. How are you going to feed this beast? We elected to go with 4KW diesel engines, in a redundant configuration. Don't forget shelters for all this as well. It cost around $15k just to get all of the equipment to the site. Another $13k for fuel to keep it running for 6 months. The hardware was $265k, and 3Mb from Telesat is $35k/mo.
Are there other options? Absolutely. Hughes DirecWay, XPLORnet, Shaw Direct, etc. But they're all consumer grade, unmanaged, asymmetrical, and Ku band which is highly susceptible to rain fade.
Check out the Thrane&Thrane Sailor Iridium Pilot (ex OpenPort) data and voice comms sytems. Around $5k for the terminal which provides phone and 100kbps-ish internet.
If you need more than that the FleetBroadBand 500 has been very solid for us but the terminal is $16k and data is $9/mb.
Raymarine's new NMEA2000 (seatalk ng) equipment is pretty versatile, but the shiny new E series gear is not very rugged. The C90 is still available and is a solidly built performer. Raymarine also just announced class A and B AIS transponders. Handy having all the sensors on one network, all feeding blended data to all of your plotters.
Stay away from Garmin RADAR. They emit a lot of noise and interfere with VHF. They're priced where they are for a reason.
Standard Horizon GX5500 DSC radio is affordable and works. I run these on west coast 'hard use' vessels with a totally reasonable failure rate. Don't skimp on the coax. It's worth it to pay for LMR200, RG223, or RG400 for your main VHF antenna run, and don't ever ever use those crap Shakespeare compression RF fittings.
EPIRB is nice to have, but someone's got to come looking for it to be of real use. Many parts of the world don't have any real SAR capacity, so its utility becomes a bit moot.
Spot or an equivalent may be a better choice, depending on where you're going, and who you want to keep updated.
Cellular modems and the newer integrated hubs are handy if you've got a good data plan. I've had good success with the 4G NETGEAR MVBR1210C Turbo Hub on littoral vessels. These offer both data and a phone port.
If you do the wifi thing, consider putting a well sealed Ubiquity BulletHP on an antenna up the mast. Very cheap and surprisingly effective radios.
Here's the problem with that: China don't give a shit about your patent, and will produce your design and offer it for sale cheaper than the cost of your raw materials. Good luck with that lawsuit.
Have you seen the photos of the WD factory? The water was near the ceiling on the ground floor. Vehicles in the loading bays were submerged to the roofline. This was a significant flood event.
Check out Ubiquiti's AirView product. $39 for a 2.4Ghz analyzer. No, really.
I have a couple of these and they work. Granted, it's not a $24K Anritsu, but it will get you started. You may just need to switch channels, and this guy will show you if there's noise that it can hear.
Order yourself a nice high power jammer from dealextreme and make the problem go away. The best part is that the cellular networks are already somewhat inherently unreliable, so when you force someone's call to drop, they just accept it. It never even crosses their mind that someone could be deliberately interfering. I've heard that it's very satisfying to see the loudmouth in the train car suddenly shut up and scowl at a phone that now displays no service.
(Car Analogy) - It's like leasing a car with a repair warranty and wanting to do your own repairs. You diagnose the cause of the problem and take the car to the mechanic. You ask the mechanic to fix your car under warranty and he asks you for your keys. You refuse to give him the keys.
I find your analogy to be somewhat flawed. A better analogy would be like the city or municipality forcing your car open when you don't hand over the keys after you've called to have your street repaired.
Bell and DirecTV bricked thousands of pirate receivers a few years ago. People that didn't know what JTAG meant or how to use google ended up paying big $$ to either their dealers or the Sat companies for new hardware.
yeah, the graphics blur, except for the billboard ads along the racecourse. Selling of course, current products. Kind of scary to see real ads in a game. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
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This is a pipe dream. Hydrogen is a crappy energy storage medium. High pressures make it dangerous and as the AC points out, PEM fuel cells have crappy power production rates. I'll be amazed if we ever see anything flying.
I thought it meant 'the base' ?
Remote site, no infrastructure, high reliability required, etc. We started with bare rock on the side of a channel on the northern BC coast. The only viable option to survive rain fade was C band. So now you're dealing with a 2.4m dish. Operational requirements called for 3Mb of symmetrical bandwidth which needs a 40W BUC. Leads nicely into the next point; power. How are you going to feed this beast? We elected to go with 4KW diesel engines, in a redundant configuration. Don't forget shelters for all this as well. It cost around $15k just to get all of the equipment to the site. Another $13k for fuel to keep it running for 6 months. The hardware was $265k, and 3Mb from Telesat is $35k/mo.
Are there other options? Absolutely. Hughes DirecWay, XPLORnet, Shaw Direct, etc. But they're all consumer grade, unmanaged, asymmetrical, and Ku band which is highly susceptible to rain fade.
As with most things, you get what you pay for.
The best part? You can make black powder without sulphur. It just needs a little more heat to start the reaction.
http://musketeer.ch/blackpowder/recipe.html
I would mod parent up if I had points. Undefined initialisms and acronyms inhibit communications.
If you need more than that the FleetBroadBand 500 has been very solid for us but the terminal is $16k and data is $9/mb.
Raymarine's new NMEA2000 (seatalk ng) equipment is pretty versatile, but the shiny new E series gear is not very rugged. The C90 is still available and is a solidly built performer. Raymarine also just announced class A and B AIS transponders. Handy having all the sensors on one network, all feeding blended data to all of your plotters.
Stay away from Garmin RADAR. They emit a lot of noise and interfere with VHF. They're priced where they are for a reason.
Standard Horizon GX5500 DSC radio is affordable and works. I run these on west coast 'hard use' vessels with a totally reasonable failure rate. Don't skimp on the coax. It's worth it to pay for LMR200, RG223, or RG400 for your main VHF antenna run, and don't ever ever use those crap Shakespeare compression RF fittings.
EPIRB is nice to have, but someone's got to come looking for it to be of real use. Many parts of the world don't have any real SAR capacity, so its utility becomes a bit moot.
Spot or an equivalent may be a better choice, depending on where you're going, and who you want to keep updated.
Cellular modems and the newer integrated hubs are handy if you've got a good data plan. I've had good success with the 4G NETGEAR MVBR1210C Turbo Hub on littoral vessels. These offer both data and a phone port.
If you do the wifi thing, consider putting a well sealed Ubiquity BulletHP on an antenna up the mast. Very cheap and surprisingly effective radios.
Here's the problem with that: China don't give a shit about your patent, and will produce your design and offer it for sale cheaper than the cost of your raw materials. Good luck with that lawsuit.
Uh, no? Steam has an offline mode.
The front ends on consumer GPS units were not engineered to deal with a high-power signal 25 MHz away.
This is the largest part of the problem. No one envisioned terrestrial services of this nature in this band when GPS was being created.
Have you seen the photos of the WD factory? The water was near the ceiling on the ground floor. Vehicles in the loading bays were submerged to the roofline. This was a significant flood event.
They already have much better ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC-12_Guardrail
Insects have antennae; radios use antennas. Sorry, pet peeve.
Funny how they can say this with a straight face knowing full well they've already lost.
You do know that microwave ovens operate in the same frequency band as 2.4 GHz wifi, right? They're usually centered around ch.9 in the wifi spectrum.
Maybe those that aren't cursing are lucky enough to not have to toil in a shitrix environment over a skinny latent link. Oops, did that sound bitter?
One of the main reasons I quit facecrack over a year ago was when I saw my face on a classmates banner ad at the bottom of a page.
Check out Ubiquiti's AirView product. $39 for a 2.4Ghz analyzer. No, really. I have a couple of these and they work. Granted, it's not a $24K Anritsu, but it will get you started. You may just need to switch channels, and this guy will show you if there's noise that it can hear.
Heh. Where's a boy and his flying snake when you need them?
Order yourself a nice high power jammer from dealextreme and make the problem go away. The best part is that the cellular networks are already somewhat inherently unreliable, so when you force someone's call to drop, they just accept it. It never even crosses their mind that someone could be deliberately interfering. I've heard that it's very satisfying to see the loudmouth in the train car suddenly shut up and scowl at a phone that now displays no service.
(Car Analogy) - It's like leasing a car with a repair warranty and wanting to do your own repairs. You diagnose the cause of the problem and take the car to the mechanic. You ask the mechanic to fix your car under warranty and he asks you for your keys. You refuse to give him the keys.
I find your analogy to be somewhat flawed. A better analogy would be like the city or municipality forcing your car open when you don't hand over the keys after you've called to have your street repaired.
You could run off a charger and batteries to smooth any power bumps from the genny.
What's wrong with writing your passwords down on a card in your wallet?
Bell and DirecTV bricked thousands of pirate receivers a few years ago. People that didn't know what JTAG meant or how to use google ended up paying big $$ to either their dealers or the Sat companies for new hardware.
Cam.
uh, all of the phone-and-battery-specific charging circuitry is in the phone ... the adapter is just supplying power. They're ALL THE SAME.