Everest live - a recap on the holy grail of Everest tech
Mar 7, 2005 17: 36 EST
Parts of last years Everest Discovery team will be back this season, to give the top another shot. Shaunna Burke fought long and hard on the South Col in 2004, but had to come down in the end. Now she is back with last year's expedition leader Ben Webster. It's not yeat confirmed if they will be joining the Kanatek Ottawa expedition (the hockey guys).
The Burke/Webster team is sponsored by Telecom Ottawa, according to a press release, and will do real-time satellite video from Base camp to six schools in Ottawa. (Shaunna Burke is completing a Ph. D. in Sports Psychology at the University of Ottawa.)
The tech is set up for educational reasons, which leads us nicely to the yearly ExWeb recap on Everest video tech.
The skinny on the history of Live tech on Everest
Whilst live video is done from Everest BC on occasion, the holy grail has always been live video from the summit. In 2003 the Chinese had the biggest rig by far, running fiber optics on the mountain and driving in huge satellite trucks. The Chinese, however, were certainly not the first – some news agencies touted. The first true broadcast all the way to television was back in 1988 with a joint Chinese/Japanese/Nepali expedition. (And heck, don't forget the live transmissions from the moon a billion years ago :).
Tech with a KISS
That's why the coolest live summit video yet was done in 2003 by a small team of Catalans. They did a "tech with a kiss" ('Keep It Simple Stupid'). That's how Burt Rutan put SpaceShipOne in Space and Bill Gates put a computer on Grandma's desk.
Almost as if out of the blue, ExWeb received an email shortly after it happened, including footage from climber Serge Mingote at the summit. These guys were also the most forthcoming about their achievement – It was transmitted live from the summit to Spanish TV3 for 8 minutes of summit footage and they were the first in the world to broadcast from the radio shadow of Everest’s South Face.
All the other video was attempted from the North side. These guys were one of our favorites – unlike many others that year, they didn’t come out and brag about it; instead the just delivered – and not with the humongous crews that the others had backing them up.
The poor man's video
So what can you do if you want to chat live with your sweetheart form camp 2? In a recent story, we pointed to the new options for video on Everest. The recent price drop makes it possible to pick up an RBGAN for $1000, including 40 MB of transfer. The 40 MB roughly equals 60 dispatches with image (CONTACT 3.0), 1000 e-mails and 10 videos like the one Scott Woolums made from Everest C3 during the hurricane in 2003 (find it on WebTV in the menu on MountEverest.net). The same transfer (40MB) would cost the expedition some $1500 from a Thuraya handset and $5000 from an Iridium!
At 1600 gr. (57 ounces), the RBGAN isn’t something you bring to the summit, but several expeditions have brought it to C2 at Everest South and ABC on North.
There’s nothing cooler than doing a Messenger pop up on your friend’s PC while at Everest. It gets cooler with 144 kb/s. Add a web cam (expect low resolution and 1 pic every other second or so) to your laptop – log up on messenger and your friends back home can chat live with you at C2.
Image of Shaunna, courtesy of Ben Webster/algonquincollege
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