Lorenzo Gariano who runs Botany Bottle and looks after the plants at the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, went climbing in the Everest region and sent back audio reports. All this was part of Lorenzo's Seven Summits activities: climbing the highest peak on each continent (read more about Lorenzo's Seven Summits quest).
Lhotse - The Technology
Scott Woolums describes some of the technology they had available on the expedition, the satellite phones available to Lorenzo:
"We'll have 2 or 3 sat phones. 2 of the Iridiums and 1 Thuraya, which works a bit better there. Also a BGAN high speed internet terminal at base camp on the Thuraya satellite. And we will have a very new Pocket PC to Thuraya (or Iridium) phone connection for data. It will allow instant photos/video/sound to go direct to our web page. An amazing system. There has not been anything like this yet on Everest. The Thuraya phone is very small, offers good data speed, it connects direct to the Compaq iPAQ which we can pop in the Sony memory stick with photos and video on, scribble a short message and hit send and it appears that moment on our web page! It really should be very cool. We will have 2 laptops also with data connections at base camp for email and reports between trips up high."
At the KMi end, Lorenzo dialed in to a dedicated phone line connected to a Creative Labs voice modem card in a PC running IVM's Answering Attendant software. This recorded the incoming message as a WAVe file, compressed it with the MP3 codec and FTP transfered it to the webserver. The actual blog web page is built on-the-fly using a PHP script which checks for the presence of sound files, and similarly-names text and image files, in a particular folder. These are listed chronologically and for each one, if they exist, a JPG image or TXT file are also displayed. These latter files are the only ones that are created by hand - the rest of the system is automatic.
© 2003 Lorenzo Gariano and the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University
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These pages are the personal responsibility of Lorenzo Gariano and the members of KMi who are supporting him. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the Open University. The University takes no responsibility for any material on these pages.
