I read the text but I didn't watch the video (hate videos for
information transfer), so maybe this is answered there -- but are we
really sure this is supposed to communicate with /endpoints/ (cell
phones, desktops, whatever)? Technologically, it would be far easier --
and still useful -- if it were set up like the InternetAnywhere solution
they've been pushing in Canada (which is satellite based). You need a
fixed downlink but you don't need 500 miles of cable to be strung from
the nearest city before you can hook up. That's important in Canada,
where the northern population is very sparse.
The downlinks could be pretty cheap -- 15 miles is a lot closer than a
typical satellite distance. Set up the downlinks with free hotspots and
you can get a great deal of coverage with a lot less technical
difficulty than you'd have trying to fly a full-blown cell phone tower.
And the planes, incidentally, may be out of range of most cell phones.
I'd think 15 miles would be really pushing it for receiving a signals
from hand held devices, unless the plane has humongous high-gain
antennas on it.
Also note that cell phone /tower /antennas can be optimized for planar
broadcast, which means all their energy is going into a minimal area,
and best case, falloff could be roughly 1/r rather than 1/r^2. These
planes will be broadcasting into a cone, which isn't so nice, and
they're going to be dealing with 1/r^2 signal falloff for sure. (That's
the downbound link, of course -- the geometry presumably doesn't affect
the difficulty of receiving signals from users nearly as much.)
On 08/05/2016 11:15 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I suppose it's not actually WIFI . . .
I think it is cell phone technology, not WiFi. Cell phone towers use a
lot of power, so I do not know how this will work. The aircraft will
communicate with one-another and with ground stations using lasers.
If they really draw 5 kw (as per the last paragraph), well, that's
impressive on the one hand (7 horsepower or thereabouts is not
much for keeping a plane up) but on the other hand, the solar
panels need to put out more than twice that much if it's going to
stay up 24 hours . . .
The panels + batteries on this machine produce and store enough
electricity to keep it going 24 hours a day. Output is 5 kW but the
panels produce more than that.
The plan is to slowly fly up much higher than commercial aircraft, and
then loiter over one spot of 3 months or so. Then another aircraft
will take up station while this one is brought down for maintenance.
- Jed
