Communications

We have been very kindly lent an Iridium satellite handset so that Lorenzo can send photos and sound recordings from Antarctica. At present, Iridium is the only system that covers Antarctica, due to its use of a constellation of orbiting satellites in low orbit.

Socket Mobile very kindly lent us a SoMo 650 ruggedised PDA for Lorenzo to use with Pocket Phojo to send photos back to us. The SoMo has both SD and Compact Flash slots and we will be using the optional 2.6Ah battery.

Lorenzo will be using a Canon Powershot A570 IS digital camera (chosen because of its small size, excellent image quality, use of readily-available AA batteries and SD memory card). He takes the SD Flash card from the camera and inserts it into SoMo 650 running Pocket Phojo software. He then picks which images he wants to send, and the software resizes and IPTC tags them, then transmits them via serial link to the Iridium handset. With the Iridium system, the maximum data rate is a mere 2400bps, so to cut transmission time (and cost) we shrink the images to web size before transmission.

---