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GCN Home > October 22, 2001 issue

Can NWS balloons host cell traffic?

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Space Data Corp. wants to piggyback its cellular repeaters on government weather balloons to cover the entire continental United States, and beyond.

Skepticism is “everybody’s initial reaction” to the idea of routing wireless phone calls via balloons, said Jerry Knoblach, chief executive officer and co-founder of the Chandler, Ariz., company.

But Knoblach said he is convinced that the 69 lighter-than-air balloons launched by the National Weather Service every 12 hours will do the trick. “We think that redundancy can achieve reliable, ubiquitous coverage,” Knoblach said.

The Federal Communications Commission has given its OK to the scheme, and Space Data is talking with the weather service.

“Discussions are under way,” NWS spokeswoman Susan Weaver confirmed. She said it is too early to comment on the project.

Space Data, however, wants to start a paging service next year, with or without NWS cooperation. Voice service and broadband data service would follow.

For about 50 years, the weather service has launched balloons to collect high-altitude data. The balloons rise to the stratosphere, about 20 miles above the Earth’s surface, and drift with the prevailing winds. Their instrument packages transmit data to ground stations for 12 hours, and then a new generation is launched. The old balloons eventually fall back to Earth.

The Federal Aviation Administration limits the weight of the instrument packages to 6 pounds. Improved electronics has shrunk the size of the NWS packages to the point that Space Data believes there now is room for other equipment to ride along.

Page from 100,000 feet

Spokesman Tim Ayers said half-watt pager signals have reached lightweight balloon-borne repeaters at 100,000 feet. A repeater’s 190-watt signal can cover an area 360 miles across, he said. At that power, the 69 NWS balloons aloft at any time would have a total coverage area of more than 7 million square miles, about twice the area of the continental United States. The signals relayed from a balloon would go to a base station at the balloon’s launch site.

Space Data intends to act as a virtual tower company, selling its coverage to primary cellular carriers. The target market would be the 20 percent of the population in the 80 percent of the nation that is too remote for economical cellular coverage.

The repeaters would be relatively low-powered and designed for light traffic, Ayers said. “This signal is not going to get inside a large concrete building,” he said. But out of doors and in small buildings, connections should be possible.



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