Throughput
Feb. 19th, 2003 01:52 amI'm sitting here late at night, for the eighth night in a row... the paper went off to Japan last night, tonight I'm catching up on entirely mundane air traffic management visuals.
One stark moment at this afternoon's air traffic technology planning meeting... a colleague from NASA-Dryden was discussing their incipient shift from classical pulse-code modulated telemetry to a network structure, and added that they'd used 802.11b. Out to an aircraft 20 miles distant. I was impressed, as we're lucky to get a quarter of that on the ground on Devon Island.
Then the Dryden guy said, "that's nothing... the Army has their training ground at Yuma completely saturated. They can fire tanks remotely from their desktops." Okay.... I imagine something like a real-life video game... wondering vaguely what defines "work-safe" in that context.
Then he added," and they've been putting it on ordnance, too, like shells. 802.11b packets can handle the Doppler shifting up to Mach 10." That gives new meaning to throughput... I'm sure that the details are classified, but I can't help wondering what they're doing with 2-way digital communication with unguided shells...
One stark moment at this afternoon's air traffic technology planning meeting... a colleague from NASA-Dryden was discussing their incipient shift from classical pulse-code modulated telemetry to a network structure, and added that they'd used 802.11b. Out to an aircraft 20 miles distant. I was impressed, as we're lucky to get a quarter of that on the ground on Devon Island.
Then the Dryden guy said, "that's nothing... the Army has their training ground at Yuma completely saturated. They can fire tanks remotely from their desktops." Okay.... I imagine something like a real-life video game... wondering vaguely what defines "work-safe" in that context.
Then he added," and they've been putting it on ordnance, too, like shells. 802.11b packets can handle the Doppler shifting up to Mach 10." That gives new meaning to throughput... I'm sure that the details are classified, but I can't help wondering what they're doing with 2-way digital communication with unguided shells...