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Everest North Side: Satellite dead spots
Jul 14, 2004 11: 55 EST
Just like many major metropolitan areas, Everest has a couple dead spots of its own. What is a dead spot? It’s that area where your mobile signal dwindles down to that dreaded one-bar, or even none. You’re in the middle of a city making a major business deal and the call gets dropped.
Line of sight
Satellite phones are supposed to cover whole regions of the earth, so how can they get dead spots? Simple, unlike cell phones, they need a direct line of sight for the satellite that’s up above. The good thing about this is that dead spots can usually be predicted with satellite phones. Iridium has many satellites in low-orbit, constantly moving. There are more satellites to pick up a signal if your sky is partially covered, however, Iridium didn’t launch as many as they initially planned on. This means that even with a clear sky, as the satellites are going back and forth across the horizon, you might get a dropped signal.
On Everest’s North Side, the Iridium should work almost everywhere, as long as it has a patch of sky to work with. The less sky, the better the chances of a dropped call.
Aim towards Africa
The same is not the case for the Thuraya phone and the new RBGAN. Since both rely on a satellite position in a geo-synchronous orbit (moves over one fixed spot of the earth), the devices need to be aimed at a very particular spot in the sky. Wherever you are, you want to point towards Ethiopia, because that’s where the satellite is.
When you are on the North Side of a mountain in Asia, this could pose a line of sight problem. So what are the North Side dead spots?
For the Thuraya phone, you’re in luck – It works almost everywhere, from when you arrive in Lhasa, even to high up in Camp III. Being right below the north ridge, you would initially expect it not too, but it does. However, an interesting thing that happens is the registry at the summit. Instead of saying China, like it did the whole way up, the Thuraya switches over to Nepal instead. They’re on the same rate plan, however, so don’t get too excited.
Camp I, trouble spot
The biggest trouble spot for the Thuraya is the North Col. This, however, can change from year to year. This year, Camp I was tucked in underneath a serac, and unless you trekked to the edges or you got a lucky tent spot, you weren’t getting a good signal, especially at certain times of the day. Previous years when Camp I was shaped different and higher up, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem.
Base Camp, trouble spot
The Regional BGAN, which is a high speed satellite Internet connection, poses the most interesting coverage question and sparked many debates in Base Camp. We have yet to hear of a North Side team lugging one up past Advanced Base Camp – if you have, let us know. In ABC, the device worked well at all hours, no problem. In Base Camp, however, the BGAN would conk out sometime after 8 at night, Chinese time, and then resurrect itself the next morning around 9.
It was first argued that this was when usage was highest, so it would kick you off. This is not very likely considering the sheer amount of capacity the satellite can handle, not to mention the satellite has the ability to reconfigure beams in its coverage area to help out if excess capacity is required. Also, if it were a capacity problem, then wouldn’t it conk out in ABC too.
The answer is something we’ve written about before on ExplorersWeb. The satellite, even though it is geosynchronous does move a bit. And on the Rongbuk, you are aiming the BGAN and the Thuraya just over a mountain to get the satellite. It doesn’t matter whether you are just at the foot, or way across on the far side of the glacier, the BGAN won’t budge in the night – the signal is just too weak. The Thuraya though, has no problem in BC, the signal still remains strong enough for it to keep a phone call, and crystal clear at that.
Everest North Side trouble spots:
Base Camp, from evening until the morning – RBGAN doesn’t work.
Camp I, North Col, - limited Thuraya coverage due to serac in line of sight (this can change even as soon as next year depending upon how the ice shifts.)
The Iridium network covers the entire globe through a series of low earth orbit satellites. The Thuraya network, which relies on a geosynchronous satellite above Africa only covers Europe, the Middle East, Northern and Central Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and most of Central Asia. For climbers, this includes Everest, and even the North side of K2. Later on this year Thuraya is extending coverage further east to China, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Composite image of Thuraya/RBGAN’s current eastern most coverage area and Iridium’s global reach courtesy of HumanEdgeTech.com.
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