Tony's Blog

Our destination was a ridge above Hines Creek, where Betchkal planned to assemble a station to collect a month’s worth of continuous acoustic data documenting an intangible, invisible and — increasingly — endangered resource: natural sound. Our mission was not only to trap the ephemeral but also to experience it ourselves …

United grassroots efforts CAN work!
Federal officials on Tuesday struck a major blow to satellite venture LightSquared, saying the government plans to take away its permission to operate as a mainstream high-speed wireless network.

LightSquared Update
Federal Geodetic Control Subcommittee
Meeting
January 10, 2012

LightSquared Background & Spectrum Issues
NOAA Summary Testimony
NOAA Anechoic Chamber Test Results
The Way Forward

The Christmas season’s Hallmark specials and other heart rending presentations serve to exacerbate feelings of frustration. This year’s Scrooge character is played by Hedge-fund manager venture capitalist Philip Falcone, Senior Managing Director of the Harbinger Capital Partners® Funds, and his outfit called LightSquared.

GOES Satellite Video of 2011 Hurricane Season Released A video released by NASA features the whole hurricane season of 2011. It is a mesmerizing video in which one observes several repeating patterns in the North Atlantic and in the Pacific west of Mexico and, of course, the train from north Africa to the Gulf of [...]

GPS is becoming a universal feature on all new mobile devices, and there are some great apps available to take advantage of it. We think it’s the way to go, and we’ll give you ten good reasons why your cell phone should be GPS enabled too:

I received unwelcome news shortly after noon today that my former associate, the Director of the Louisiana State University Center for Geoinformatics, Roy K. Dokka, PhD died unexpectedly at his home last night.

Despite evidence of the likelihood for harmful interference to nearby GPS and other GNSS L1 signals, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appears likely to push ahead with approval of a revised LightSquared Subsidiary plan to build a dense U.S. network of high-powered ground transmitters for wireless broadband service.FacebookFacebook

On June 30, 2011, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-mandated Technical Working Group filed a 1,000-plus page report analyzing interference from LightSquared’s proposed deployment plans in the Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) band adjacent to the Global Positioning System (GPS). The working group test results showed that use of this portion of the MSS band caused overwhelming interference to every category of the 500 million GPS receivers in use in the United States, from those used by airplanes, police vehicles and ambulances to everyday consumer cell phones and personal navigational devices.
LightSquared had repeatedly said that its proposed operations would not interfere with GPS. The utter failure of LightSquared’s initial deployment plans to pass interference tests raises fundamental questions about the representations LightSquared made to the FCC prior to its January 2011 decision that convinced the FCC to grant the waiver and convene the interference study process in the first place, and raises significant questions about the credibility of LightSquared’s various claims and whether they hold up to scrutiny.