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ExplorersWeb Everest tech week Part II - Getting the whole picture from up high on the mountain to you
13:21 p.m. EDT Feb 18, 2003
In 1969, the world held its breath as the first step of man on the moon reached their TV-sets with only a few minutes delay. A few years ago, live over internet, we could watch the Mars rover go about its business with only 18 minutes delay between the red planet and earth.
If NASA could transmit live pictures from the moon back in 1969 and more recently Mars, surely it can be done on Everest?
Media sent directly from on the mountain itself is no easy task. While live video interviews from base camp are expensive, they are at least doable. Trucks, yaks or choppers bring in heavy satellite uplink equipment, a technician plugs in a camera, and away you go. The biggest challenge will be to find spare parts quickly enough.
Yaks in Camp 3?
It’s when resources, transportation, and power are really limited that multimedia transmissions from high on Everest become more difficult and almost non-existent even to this day. To get live images from high camps to the world you must lug up cameras, satellite phones, computers, and something to power all these devices with. Your means of transportation is not a rocket, but a climber’s back.
Getting the equipment higher than BC is where the problem lays – try driving a truck up to Camp II or leading a yak through the icefall – not going happen. Camp I is the highest a helicopter ever has gone – this record was set in the 1996 rescue of Beck Weathers, a surgeon who survived a storm on Everest, but lost parts of his face and hands to frostbite. The helicopter pilot actually holds two high altitude records: The world’s highest rescue and a few years later - the worlds highest crash at Everest base camp! Luckily everyone survived both pioneering events.
It’s always easier to send things down than up
One Canadian team carried up a sat phone, a video conferencing unit, and a camera up Everest in 2000. Their plan was to transmit directly from on the mountain up to a satellite. High winds thwarted this attempt.
An opposite school of thought in getting media from the mountain itself to the audience is keeping all the bulky satellite phones and computers down in base camp and somehow getting the media down there first and then relayed out to the world by means of the internet. To transmit live from high on Everest, one must think away from the tradition of bulky and heavy gear, and more towards lightweight hardware and compressed data.
In 1999 a team of climbers set out for the Everest Internet Experiment, with the mission to send live web cam pictures to the Internet from on the mountain itself. To achieve this the expedition had to build a W-LAN (Wireless Local Area Network) on the Everest camps.
IP address – Everest Camp III
Each climber wore a web cam with specific IP addresses controllable over the network. These cams were hooked up to a radio transmitter/receiver working on the IE802.11 standard at the 2.4 GHz band – the same wireless technology that is emerging today in homes, offices, coffee shops, and parks. A small tube antenna attached to the climbers’ backpack amplified the transmitting signal and sent the pictures down the mountain – all of this was powered by an ultra-light set of AA Lithium batteries.
Because the 2.4GHz band requires a clear view, three relaying stations where fixed on the mountain. Each station was equipped with an upward looking and a downward aimed 18dB antenna. The signal was relayed through a bridge with sherpa climbers manning the stations, supporting the equipment.
In base camp a 24dB antenna picked up the signal and transported it to a laptop controlled by the BC-manager. The laptop was hooked up to an Inmarsat Mini-M sat phone that communicated to the home server using an FTP client.
Mission accomplished
The result of this setup was that the network transmitted live from high above the icefall and a custom script posted the image on the Internet. It was the first coverage of its kind – pictures directly from where the climbers were and consistent daily dispatches. Another interesting aspect of the setup was that people technically could control the climbers’ web cams, zooming in and out, from their home computers!
The team was years ahead of its time using the 802.11 system to wirelessly get the pictures sent instantaneously to base camp – this same technology is starting to be used in homes and offices just now, nearly 4 years later. The team overcame the problems associated with getting pictures straight from the mountain by creating a system that was light enough to be carried, (power solutions included), and easy enough to use by illiterate sherpas and dazed mind of climbers at high-altitude.
Bringing the complete, uncensored Everest to a home near you
This technique and the execution of it brought the Everest experience closer to the people back at home like no one had ever done before. A member of the expedition comments, “We came back from this wonderful mountain in years past, opened the papers and all the media had to say about it was trash. We decided to try to bring the mountain straight home to the armchair warriors, without the interference of those biased middlemen. In following us every day, all through the ups and downs of the expedition, people would have the chance to make their own judgment."
Tomorrow the ExplorersWeb series delves into higher-speed Internet – Everest style.
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