I've seen, heard of, and in some cases designed and implemented a number of, as my son Matt would say, sweet communications systems. One of my favorite wireless apps dates from the 1950's and 1960's.
The problem was how to determine the amount of water which would be available from the snow pack on slopes in the Rockies or the Sierras. Sensors could be deployed on mountain sides during the summer by hydrologists, using cheap grad student and intern labor. The sensors could be provided with radios to periodically transmit snow depth data. But there were limited ways to collect it, as cell phones didn’t exist, satellites were too far away for the limited power budget of the sensors’ batteries, and deploying receivers on each ridge top was unfeasible.
The solution was elegant. Thousands of small meteors hit the upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, every day. As they burn up, they create an ionized region which reflects radio energy in the 6 meter band (50 MHz). By periodically transmitting, the sensors will regularly reflect from an ionized region and can be received with a modest antenna hundreds of miles away. Meteor tail messaging… sweeeet.
Great article!! With all the new fangled technology I think sometimes we forget that there are other ways of getting things done - bigger is better isn't always the solution.
Posted by: Anant | February 03, 2006 at 03:43 PM