Thursday, May 14, 2015

Global AIS on SPACE STATION and the Flex 6700R

World wide commercial ships have a problem, soon enough they are out of range of communication.  Ships these days have a AIS or automatic identification system but they system looses its link to shore with in 30 to 60 miles.  Glass is a proposed system which uses the AIS system to talk to the International Space Station.

The ISS traces a path over nearly the entire earth as it flies 400km above the earth traveling at 7.7 km/s.. that covers a lot of surface very routinely.

GLASS proposes to turn the ISS into a LEO that uploads packet data as it traverses over head.  Shades of OSCAR from decades past!  Data could include telemetry such as position and weather for example.  So as ships float around various regions reams of usable data can be obtained and analyzed.  Here is a slide show presented by Steve N5AC regarding this project  At the end I will mention  Flex Radio's involvement in this project and the value design features like the API's hold.  

So here you go.  Our radio or at least the RX version of the radio is hardened enough, reliable enough, and versatile enough to take on a space project.  

Using the very same interfaces especially Waveforms that we use this radio become the center of this data system store and forward experiment.  You read my thoughts of how amazing I think this method of turning the Flex's infrastructure into an experimenter's sand box and here is the proof of how this infrastructure can push the envelop of science and communications.  This is what ham radio was about when I first got into it 52 years ago.  I recently read a forum post describing the Flex line as the arm chair operator's SDR while the Anan crowd was the real experimenter crowd.  Read this presentation and you get a clue about who the real experimenters are.  No company in ham radio has this kind of capability off the shelf.  No company in ham radio has this kind of far reaching insight, to create a infrastructure that so easily allows these ideas to be created.