Ever wanted your own Inflatable Deployable Satellite ?

If only I saw this before Christmas

Digium recently demonstrated that VoIP is not limited to traditional desktops and terrestrial connections. At the Digium headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama a team of engineers form GATR technologies recently setup their Inflatable Deployable Satellite Communication System in the Digium parking lot.

Full story at
http://blogs.digium.com/2008/01/28/aste ... his-world/

Ian

Reply from dibsmft on Jan 29, 2008 - 01:45 PM

Looks kind of neat. Easily dropped by parachute or carried into the wilderness. It might be useful for remote medicine/education such as has been pioneered in Newfoundland & Labrador (a Canadian province with a very scattered population on a large land area and often very remote).

On the other hand...
If this thing is inflated does it not make a good target for gunfire? I can imagine "I could not send in my report because I had a puncture"

Reply from dean on Jan 29, 2008 - 02:13 PM

It's an excellent idea.

Taken out of the warzone context (yes, I can see the potential problems there) something like this could revolutionise communications in remote regions.

Reply from mazilo on Jan 29, 2008 - 03:43 PM

That's similar to what I have on my car, a LaFonera with Asterisk + a PAP2v1 unit deployed to use on any open WiFi hotspots except it is physically in a much smaller scale and/or on a limited service area.

Reply from dean on Jan 29, 2008 - 03:47 PM

Quote:

I have on my car

Something tells me you're not kidding

Can we see a pic of that?

Reply from mazilo on Jan 29, 2008 - 09:15 PM

Dean,

No kidding at all, except I don't permanently mount them in my car although the systems worked on some free WiFi hotspots I tested. I used a 75 watts power inverter as a power source for my LaFonera + PAP2v1 + my old 2.4GHz cordless phone on Line1. On Line2, I just plugged in an old black trim-line long corded phone. One funny thing about using this long-corded phone tethered outside my car was to be able to attract lots of passerby. I guessed they were just curious what kind of equipment I had in my car to let me talk, instead of a cellphone.

Anyway, I am thinking to build a voltage regulator to supply a DC power off my car battery to each device so that won't be needing a power inverter and all those bulky AC/DC power adapters. Before I can consider to put this in a permanent use, I need to find out a good way to solve the Summer heat issue.

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