Collaborate Disseminate
It is unlikely that as a young lad [Richard Jenkins] would had have visions of sailing into the eye of a Category-4 hurricane. Yet that’s exactly what he’s done with …read more Continue reading How Does A Sail Drone Bring Home Hurricane Footage In Record Time?
You’d be forgiven for thinking that receiving data transmissions from orbiting satellites requires a complex array of hardware and software, because for a long time it did. These days we have the benefit of cheap software defined radios (SDRs) that …read more
SpaceX just concluded 2017 by launching 10 Iridium NEXT satellites. A footnote on the launch was the “hosted payload” on board each of the satellites: a small box of equipment from Aireon. They will track every aircraft around the world in real-time, something that has been technically possible but nobody claimed they could do it economically until now.
Challenge one: avoid adding cost to aircraft. Instead of using expensive satcom or adding dedicated gear, Aireon listen to ADS-B equipment already installed as part of international air traffic control modernization. But since ADS-B was designed for aircraft-to-aircraft and aircraft-to-ground, Aireon had …read more
Continue reading Aireon Hitchhikes on Iridium to Track Airplanes
Big tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, are in the race of bringing Internet connectivity to unconnected parts of the world through wireless devices, flying drones, high-altitude balloons, and laser beams.
But, SpaceX founder El… Continue reading Elon Musk Plans to Launch 4,425 Satellites to provide Global Internet from Space
We live in a connected world, but that world ends not far beyond the outermost cell phone tower. [John Grant] wants to be connected everywhere, even in regions where no mobile network is available, so he is building a solar powered, handheld satellite messenger: The MyComm – his entry for the Hackaday Prize.
The MyComm is a handheld touch-screen device, much like a smartphone, that connects to the Iridium satellite network to send and receive text messages. At the heart of his build, [John] uses a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium SatComm Module hooked up to a Teensy 3.1. The firmware is …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger