April 29, 2003

Audio-Blogging from Everest

The BBC has a story today about a mountain climber who is using a satellite phone to audio-blog his ascent up Mount Everest. On a practice climb of the Matterhorn in the Alps, climber Lorenzo Gariano used a Nokia picture phone and filed audio and images via a blog service developed at Open University Knowledge Media Institute in Britain. The blog, reports the BBC, "proved immensely popular with the climbing world and Mr Gariano's latest blog is also attracting interest." You can find Gariano's audio reports from Everest here.

So... what does it take to "audio-blog" from high on Mount Everest? Some satellite phones and other rather cool technology...

We'll have 2 or 3 sat phones. 2 of the Iridiums and 1 Thuraya, which works a bit better there. Also a BGAN high speed internet terminal at base camp on the Thuraya satellite. And we will have a very new Pocket PC to Thuraya (or Iridium) phone connection for data. It will allow instant photos/video/sound to go direct to our web page. An amazing system. There has not been anything like this yet on Everest. The Thuraya phone is very small, offers good data speed, it connects direct to the Compaq iPAQ which we can pop in the Sony memory stick with photos and video on, scribble a short message and hit send and it appears that moment on our web page! It really should be very cool. We will have 2 laptops also with data connections at base camp for email and reports between trips up high.