Electronics and Communications in the Wilderness
I am sitting at the side of Lake Emma in Northern Australia, 10 km from the nearest power outlet and 50km from the nearest phone line. There are bats flying overhead, it’s pitch dark but I’m sitting editing today’s photographs for the expedition website on my laptop. How does all this work and how do I get the pictures back to you – sitting at your computer anywhere in the world?
Well the first part of the process is taking the photographs. As we’re cycling along we take digital still photographs on the video camera - the quality isn’t as good as a normal film camera but the results are instant. When we get to wherever we’re camping for the night, I can immediately load all the images on to my laptop and pick the ones for the updates.
Now the first problem I have is where to get power to run my computer and charge my batteries – so we carry a small generator, which is now purring away in the bush behind me. It runs on gasoline and can run all our computers, chargers and lights for the evening on about 5 liters of petrol/gas. We rig up extension leads to the computers and whilst I’m working on the photographs Jason and the other cyclists are writing their updates for the day.
The second thing we’re missing here in the Outback is a phone line to connect to the Internet. So we’re using a satellite telephone rigged up on our support truck to send our updates back. Normal phone lines use wires connected to your phone or computer that run out of your house or school and down the road to the telephone exchange where they can be connected to everyone else’s phones and internet servers. A satellite phone doesn’t have any wires and instead relies on sending a signal up into space to be bounced off a satellite orbiting 40,000km above earth. The signal then gets bounced back down to a earth station which is connected to all the normal phone lines and can patch us into anyone’s number or server.
But, because the signal has to travel so far and the satellite can only handle so much information the quality isn’t as good as a normal line. Normal modems connect at 56 K per second but the satellite phone can only handle 2.4 kbs so, for example, if you had to wait 10 seconds for an image to load on your computer it would take us almost 4 minutes to send. So we use special software to compress our photographs as much as we can to keep the satellite time to a minimum. It takes a little more work but once we email the photographs and updates to our webmasters it’s out on the web for everyone to see. We’ll turn off the computers, generator and satellite phone, go to our tents, sleep and start all over again tomorrow - kilometers from anywhere but still connected.
Kenny Brown