GPS, Meet LTA, A Marriage Made In Heaven
July 10, 2006 - 12:42 PM
Mobile phone airship to conquer stratosphere
A zeppelin will replace all of the terrestrial mobile phone antennas in Switzerland - if a Swiss inventor has his way.
Should Kamal Alavi’s project for the high-tech airship take wing, the worlds of mobile telephony and data transmission would be turned on their heads.
Not only would the technology, called High Altitude Platform Systems (Haps), make the current 1,000 earth-bound antennas redundant, it would drastically reduce radiation.
A Swiss of Iranian extraction, Alavi is a former aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur who heads his own firm, Stratxx. Together with a team of 50 scientists, he is preparing a 2007 test run of the airship, which he has named the “X station”.
Thanks to a GPS steering system developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the 60-meter long helium-filled balloon will remain stationary at 21 kilometres above the earth. Rest of Article Here:
I love this item. It combines three of my favorite things … GPS … efficient telephony … and aircraft, specifically LTA - Lighter Than Air.
Because the dirigible or rigid airship did not come to fruition as a great passenger and freight carrying commercial success, it has been nearly abandoned by science and innovation. The only visible commercial use of non-rigid airships (blimps) is commercial advertising, mainly over sporting events. The blimps flourish because the have extremely long “loiter” times and can stay on station using very, very little fuel.
Here in the US there are thousands upon thousands of cell towers. Many are ugly, most are inefficient, and building a cellular network is a continual exercise in the “Hobson’s Choice”. Many times cell towers can’t be put in the best location, and engineers always have to reduce the real number of towers from the desired areas of coverage to the most economically viable (less coverage) area.
In the satellite communications world the system that operates on innovation is Iridium. Instead of having to find a satellite and point a phone antenna at the “bird” to make a connection, an Iridium user just turns on his or her phone and one of many, many satellites will provide signal. each Iridium satellite is logically like a cell phone tower in the sky. A phone finds a platform with the highest signal strength and the call begins. If the platform begins to go out of range or become less suitable, the phone searched for the next best signal and (when all works right) switches the call automatically.
Each cell tower on the ground can see only a small footprint of the earth. The higher the better, but, especially if the cellular carrier needs to build the tower, height is always limited by economics as well as zoning, Federal Air Space regulations, etc.
Enter the “X Station”. At 21 kilometers (far above jet airliner traffic … in a very lightly used area of the sky) the ship would hover, keeping station by solar-powered motors and a GPS navigation system. When a cell phone turns on anywhere within the airship’s huge footprint, “Bam!”, rock solid signal because it totally line of sight. The cell phone user would have to drive a very substantial distance to go out of range, but if he or she did, the call should continue to the next airborne platform using conventional cellular switching technology.
Thousands of towers could come down … or not have to be built. Coverage would extend to the “rest of the country”, not just a narrow swatch along Interstate highways. And significant reduction in radiation that all are exposed to today would occur … no cell transceivers on the outside of your office building, radiating you day and night with the maximum allowable does of RF radiation.
I like this idea.
