[aklug] Re: wireless on airlines

Mike,

From an engineering perspective I thought the same thing. However, when
my Dad flies his cub from Anchorage to Kodiak he only looses signal for
5-10 minutes right in between Homer/Kodiak. This impressed me. I don't
know if he was riding atmo bounce or what, but the coverage at ~5,000'
is impressive as well as the sound quality. ....no external antenna
either. I can't imaging that there is many towers past Homer; obviously
that's way past the 12 mile range folks quote for a tower. I bet the
antenna's on the ridge are pretty focused to blanket the bay.

Though I doubt this counts as in-flight internet. : p

-Ben

Mike Tibor wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Jenkinson, John P (SAIC) wrote:
>
>
>> it seems like airlines have two methods of providing customer wireless.
>> satellite which is expensive to add to the plane, and cell based
>> wireless which is cheaper, but not good for flying over water or wher
>> cell based infrastructure is sparce.
>>
>
> I've never actually tried to get a cell signal in the air, but my guess is
> you'd be lucky to get any signal at all from the air.
>
> Generally speaking, the goal of the antenna coverage of a cell site is not
> to reach out as far as possible which is usually the case with most radio
> transmissions--it's actually to *limit* the footprint. Usually this is
> done by angling the antennas down several degrees. With the antennas of
> most cell sites angled down like that, you most likely wouldn't get any
> usable signal from the air.
>
> The reason for limiting the footprint is because the larger the footprint
> of a single site, the more customer phones are going to 'register' with
> that site at any given time. But you want your customers spread out
> fairly uniformly over all your cell sites, so you start limiting the
> footprint of your most heavily loaded sites, and then locating new sites
> nearby.
>
> Mike
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Received on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:01:12 -0900