Orbital Mechanics Ate My Weblog

The Eleventh Hope

Presented by: Edward K. Beale
Date: Saturday July 23, 2016
Time: 11:00 - 11:50
Location: Friedman

At high latitudes, orbital mechanics make deep-ocean Internet almost impossible. In most cases, it is not wattage, atmospheric attenuation, latency, or antenna position that are the culprits - it is geometry. In 2001, Edward blogged about his voyage to Antarctica aboard an icebreaker as lead helicopter pilot. Twelve years later, he completed a full shipboard circumnavigation and delivered a daily weblog to several hundred crowdsourced readers, later self-published in the book West By Sea. Across those years, Internet access got better, but at high latitudes it still sucked. In addition to sea stories about massaging crappy packets, this talk outlines the basics of deep ocean bandwidth in layman's terms, gives a short modern history of the tools and tech, outlines new innovations that meld terrestrial and orbital bandwidth for offshore users, and focuses on the burgeoning need for better solutions at high latitudes.

Edward K. Beale


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