2022-01-06, 10:23 PM
Hello from (very rainy) San Francisco!!!
I am Peter, the designer of MAIANA. Now that the Open Source marine space has an AIS transponder option, I'm starting to think about the "next thing", and satellite connectivity caught my eye.
Seems that most people pay through the nose for things like Iridium, which is kind of silly when you think about the fact that we have literally thousands of nanosats from a multitude of companies at low earth orbit these days (in fact, LOE is getting congested). So I started looking at this half jokingly and half seriously, and as it turns out, I believe there is a path ...
Let me outline what I think is possible first. We're not talking Starlink and Netflix streaming in the middle of the Northern Atlantic here, OK?
I think it is possible to do the following:
I believe that I can deliver this for about $120-$200 annually, depending on which weather data set we go with. But that's the catch, it has to be annual.
In terms of hardware, I am pretty sure I can supply a transceiver kit for about $200 (again, that's ballpark). It will be something like the AIS unit, mounted outside, and connected to the Pi via a USB breakout + 12V power.
What do you think?
I am Peter, the designer of MAIANA. Now that the Open Source marine space has an AIS transponder option, I'm starting to think about the "next thing", and satellite connectivity caught my eye.
Seems that most people pay through the nose for things like Iridium, which is kind of silly when you think about the fact that we have literally thousands of nanosats from a multitude of companies at low earth orbit these days (in fact, LOE is getting congested). So I started looking at this half jokingly and half seriously, and as it turns out, I believe there is a path ...
Let me outline what I think is possible first. We're not talking Starlink and Netflix streaming in the middle of the Northern Atlantic here, OK?
I think it is possible to do the following:
- While a boat is moored, it can send just shy of 1KB of telemetry data per day anywhere on earth. JSON is definitely not the right format for this, so we'll need some clever compression (not a big problem I think)
- While a boat is sailing offshore, it can send its track daily (to share with family and friends) and get the latest weather prediction in response. Don't think full GRIBs of the ocean here, just what's expected along the route. I would need to know COG, SOG, recent track and expected waypoints. I'm pretty sure I figured out how to encode enough data into the daily downlink bandwidth I can get (which is smaller than the uplink). There will be some software magic on both sides of the link, but it's doable.
I believe that I can deliver this for about $120-$200 annually, depending on which weather data set we go with. But that's the catch, it has to be annual.
In terms of hardware, I am pretty sure I can supply a transceiver kit for about $200 (again, that's ballpark). It will be something like the AIS unit, mounted outside, and connected to the Pi via a USB breakout + 12V power.
What do you think?