McMurdo internet has slowed to a crawl with the addition of 250 people during winfly (September winter fly in period). The station has a 60 mega bits per second (mbps) pipe that is transferred to the Black Island Telecommunications Facility via microwave. Black Island is 25 miles southwest across McMurdo Sound and was named that by the Discovery crew because snow does not accumulate there. Black Island sits directly west of White Island which has snow. They both sit in the shadow of Mt. Discovery. The microwaved link is then transferred to a ground dish antenna and uplinked to a near stationary Australian Optus satellite. The satellite sends the data to a ground tracking and processing center in Belrose, Australia. From there the data continues by an undersea AT&T cable to California. From California the data is sent to New York where 40mbps of the data pipe is sent to Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The remaining 20mbps is sent to Antarctic Support Contract in Denver where it is prioritized.
What starts off as 60mbps splits to 40 for NASA/JPSS and 20 for the rest of the station. This also includes three Armed Forces Network television channels. In comparison Brighthouse Cable network sells a home standard package of 10mbps, and upgraded turbo package at 20mbps, and top lightening package of 40mbps. So you can see that a typical house with the turbo package has the same bandwidth as the entire McMurdo Station minus the NASA portion. Sites such as YouTube have one of the lowest priorities. At first this was very frustrating but it comes with the territory. I can't imagine summertime with up to 1100 people using a "one house" internet.
 |
| Black Island Telecommunications Facility. |
 |
| Belrose, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. |
 |
| Postcards |
 |
| A very appropriate Florida Today cartoon by Jeff Parker about the scaled down U.S. Manned Space Program. |
 |
| My roommate attached a message board to our door. The other day I saw this message that wasn't addressed to either of us. I kind of figured it wasn't for me...and I was correct. |
 |
| An early morning moon over Mt. Discovery. |
 |
| Working on one of the antennas today. Observation Hill...another one of my playgrounds. |
 |
| Equipment being dragged out to the sea ice runway. |
 |
| Ob Hill and the "ski slope" that is fun for sliding. |
 |
| Mt. Erebus |
 |
| The High Frequency Transmission Site - emergency communications. |
 |
| Our new van. |
 |
| The sea ice runway. The actual runway is the groomed area through the middle. |
No comments:
Post a Comment