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| Science & Technology |
| Iridium and the WoT |
| 2006-02-06 |
| Most American troops are regular users of the Internet, and know how useful a broadband connection can be. But when in combat, or some out-of-the-way place, they will take whatever they can get. And the “whatever” is usually a Motorola 9505 satellite phone. This is the latest model of the first Iridium satellite phone. The good news is that you can hook your 9505 to your laptop, and get access to the Internet. The bad news is, you only got a 220 characters a second connection (that's 2400 baud, most dial up connections these days are about 4,000, and broadband delivers over a hundred times that.) Despite the slow data rate, the troops make good use of their 9505’s. Especially for counter-terrorism missions, which can put the troops at the corner of no & where in places like Afghanistan and northeast Africa, the 9505 is the best way to stay in touch with the rest of the world. The U.S. Army Special Forces particularly like them, and the U.S. Marines have used the 9505 as the core element in an improvised battlefield Internet. The 9505 weighs 13.2 ounces, is 6.2 inches long, 2.5 inches wide and 2.3 inches deep. In effect, a large cell phone. Each battery charge gives you 3.6 hours of talk time, and 38 hours on standby. Recharging often takes place via a vehicle power supply (hummer, or aircraft, depending on where the 9505 is.) The 9505 has revolutionized how battles, especially in the war on terror, are fought. Commanders, as well as troops, now have a lightweight, worldwide communications system. It is also a secure system, as there is an encryption option (approved by the NSA) for the 9505. SOCOM (U.S. Special Operations Command), often has teams of commandoes spread over huge areas. With the 9505, a commander back in the U.S. can coordinate those ops, and his far-flung teams can call for help at any time, from any place. With the 9505, they can talk to bomber or transport pilots overhead, or to an aircraft carrier a thousand miles a way. What the military is lusting after is a new system of satellites that will provide higher transmission speed. As it stands now, troops can only send or receive low resolution photos. Email is not a problem, as long as the messages are not huge (which the troops in the field prefer.) The problem is that new satellites, that can provide up to a hundred times more data speed, will also cost nearly $20 billion. The Department of Defense is tempted, but Congress is less enthusiastic. The Iridium system, largely funded by Motorola, went live in late 1998, and filed for bankruptcy the following Summer. It overestimated the market for expensive satellute phone service. Before the 79 Iridium satellites could be pulled out of orbit (and burned up in the process), the U.S. Department of Defense arranged for an investor group to purchase Iridium (for pennies on the dollar), and revive it. As part of the deal, the Department of Defense got a very attractive deal. stepped in with an offer. The Department of Defense got cheap rates for up to 20,000 Iridium based “devices” (mostly phones, but also pagers and such.) That was enough for someone to come in and take over the satellite system (which cost more than $3 million to operate) and make a go of it. The new owners didn’t have the $5.5 billion in debt to worry about, and were able to lower prices enough that they were able to sign up 140,000 other customers (civilian and military, as of the end of 2005). Civilian users pay $1.50 a minute to call anyone on the planet. To call an Iridium user, however, it costs about $7 a minute. The Department of Defense wants a satellite communications capability that can support a true "battlefield Internet." That will require at least 50,000 satellite phones, and much faster connection speed.. The sweet deal with Iridium won’t last long, as the Iridium satellite will have to be replaced by 2014, and that will cost billions, and raise the rates for Department of Defense satellite phones. Meanwhile, those Iridium birds have been turned into a vital "military installation," and targets. I'm sure the thought has crossed their mind that you don't have to upgrade the entire Iridium system, just several critical satellites to act as relays. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #23 LOL! |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-02-06 20:50 |
| #22 Hell, when I was in school we had to hit rocks together in binary. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-02-06 20:15 |
| #21 My favourite story about those days concerns a device dreamt up and actually built that used large punched cards as random access memory. The device certainly existed, although this story may be apocryphal. At the time I worked for ICL who had the largest computer room in Europe in Bracknell west of London. It had a huge computer room that looked very impressive and was a popular place for salesmen to take customers. There was a salesman in our office better known for ability to think on his feet than his knowledge of computers. This salesman took a prospect on a tour of Bracknell. Even though the computer room itself was impressive there is really not a whole lot to see. Computer equipment just sits there, although flashing lights on the front were still in vogue in those days. So, the punched card random access device that had a robotic arm to grab the required card and place it in the reader was a popular thing to show prospects cos you could actually see something happening (and I suspect it was kept for this reason, since it obviuosly had no commercial potential). As might be expected the device was pretty unreliable and frequently malfuntioned. This salesman was showing the device in action when it started grabbing punched cards and flinging them on the floor. The salesman explained to his prospect that "This device is so advanced, it can tell when it picks up a card if there is a problem with it and automatically rejects cards that are faulty." He then ushers his prospect out of the room as the device continues to fling around punched cards. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-06 16:58 |
| #20 Good to see that Iridium was salvaged. I was outraged that they ever thought of deorbiting the satellites. As to computers, in high school we had a Wang 8 bit with paper tape booting and I/O. We also had access to the Forest Service's Univac running Fortran IV on punched cards. Then we got our mitts on a linkup with a CDC 6400 and finally a CDC 6600 with 6400s for input and output. I had personal friends who went on to work with Seymour Cray. One participated in the NASA Ames Cray II install. He barely managed to save the CPU from a complete meltdown. The offending PCBs had large holes in them and almost started cooking off the inert fluorinated cooling fluid they were submerged in. Can you say, devolved fluorine gas? I also managed to get a tour of Cray Research in Colorado Springs (the old INMOS building where I once installed a plasma etcher) and saw what they had built of the Cray III. All those gold terminations made the place look like Fort Knox. Some real purdy hardware. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-02-06 16:11 |
| #19 Card handling is a lost art. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 15:30 |
| #18 I wrote my first program for a DG Nova in 1971. No disk or other internal storage, so you saved your programs to punched paper tape. I then progressed to punched cards. I became very adept at punching cards with a device the size and weight of a house brick. It had I recall twelve keys on the front and you had to press 2 or 3 keys simultaneously to get what ever ASCII character you required punched on the card. Not a skill I anticipate using ever again. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-06 15:29 |
| #17 Hah!! I wired boards for the IBM 407. The earth had not yet cooled and dinosaurs roamed the earth. . . |
| Posted by: Doc8404 2006-02-06 15:19 |
| #16 Youngster. Lol, yep, that's me. I stayed techie, ecshewed the paper pusher / mgmnt route, and 31 yrs was enuff, lol. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-02-06 13:42 |
| #15 Frank, LOL. Even my dad didn't tell me that one. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 13:36 |
| #14 Iridium as with many Motorola products was way ahead of its time. To say that Motorola overestimated the market for public SatCom does not even get close to the truth. Motorola is a techie company and this was a techie problem that had to be solved. I am so glad to see the DOD make use of it for what it was intended. To many of us, we knew Iridium would never make it for Public Service; however, for the very small market segment that requires over the horizon communications from anywhere on the face of the Earth, ('cept inbuilding of course) Iridium is priceless. Thanks for posting the article Anonymoose. |
| Posted by: TomAnon 2006-02-06 13:35 |
| #13 Youngster. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 13:35 |
| #12 Heh, nope. I started in Jan '75 on HP minis. '76 was my IBM year. Then it was CDC gear at a timesharing outfit called United Computing Svcs - specialized in Awl Bidness clients. Old Seymour was a purdy good engineer (started out in AC), heh. Then they got the 4th Cray built - woohoo! A timeshared Cray, lol, with 500KB of memory, lmao. Can you say "restart files", lol? Then PC's showed up in '81 and I went solo for 18 of the next 25 yrs. Beaucoup FORTRAN. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-02-06 13:27 |
| #11 The best I can do is having to walk 2 miles to and from school in the winter blizzards, uphill both ways we couldn't afford shoes, so to get traction we'd wrap our bare feet in barb-wire |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-02-06 13:25 |
| #10 Ever program in MAP, through a 1401 to a 7094? |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 13:13 |
| #9 Lol - I remember when we got our first IBM 029 and fed boxes of cards punched on the 026 into it to get the print, lol. COBOL, aka Grace's revenge, lol. Did a year of it at an Ins Co (IBM 360) in, um, '76, just to put on the resume, heh. Then back to Engr world - I fig'd there were only so many interesting ways to split a buck, heh. Built a wall around my desk outta card decks. I left strategic firing holes, of course, lol. Re: the topic. $20Bn does NOT sound unreasonable, given the payback, IMHO. Congress wastes that much every hour in their ongoing porcine earmarks. I liked the Prez's call for the Line-Item Veto. It's absurd that there are earmarks, period, and equally absurd to have this idiotic tradition of deciding on a bill with 10 totally unrelated riders "as is" or not at all, i.e. veto it. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-02-06 13:12 |
| #8 Does having to program in Cobol with a Bachman-designed database managager count? Cause my 4 bit assembly came after that .... heh I had a log-log slide rule in highschool, but truth be told I seldom used it for anything beyond multiplication and division .... |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-02-06 13:00 |
| #7 Well I was gonna pull out my punched cards and then tty stories, but it's already been done. The best I can do is having to walk 2 miles to and from school in the winter blizzards, uphill both ways ..... |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-02-06 12:58 |
| #6 My ASR-33 had a paper tape punch / reader a tty at 300 for slow or try 75 baud asynch...Oh, no! Not another "back in my day" Thread! Anyone here have Manual Morse war stories? Signal flags? Helio-graph? Smoke signals?(looks pointedly at Old Spook.) Seriously, though, I was wondering what DOD was going to do when the Iridium system finaly died. The capability is too useful to loose. |
| Posted by: N guard 2006-02-06 12:57 |
| #5 Heh, NS. I sed it to cut tapes to burn EPROMS - used to literally dance across the room on a long tape. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-02-06 12:32 |
| #4 Great confetti makers. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 12:28 |
| #3 My ASR-33 had a paper tape punch / reader, NS. I was stylin', heh. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-02-06 12:10 |
| #2 2400 is blazing. Try a tty at 300 for slow. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 11:23 |
| #1 Saw an Iridium flash last week, always startling. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-02-06 11:21 |