Internet at Siple Dome
Another week has gone by here at Siple Dome. This week has been a weather reporting farce. We finished grooming the runway this week but have only gotten one little Twin Otter in and they can land on just about anything anyway. The big Hercs keep canceling their fuel stops here. There is a very big camp
that is going in about 200 miles from here. When it is finished it will be larger than Palmer station (currently the 3rd largest US station in Antarctica). At the moment there is only a flag marking the spot where it is to be built. The construction crew and camp staff are all waiting for good weather there to begin building the camp. They have been waiting for over a month. Their plan has
been to go light on fuel so they can go heavy on cargo. After they drop the cargo the idea is to stop here for fuel so they can make it back to McMurdo.
Since we are on the flight path and the closest manned operation to the site we are also called on to do weather reports for the planes going in. The planes require weather from us hourly beginning 6 hours before departure and every hour during flight; they usually depart (or plan to depart) at 0930 from McMurdo. This mean we get up at 0300 to begin reporting our conditions even though we are far enough from WAIS (the big campsite on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) that our weather is completely different here. For the past three weeks they have kept us getting up only to turn around without landing either here or there for one reason or another; usually weather related. Yesterday they had a full plane with the put-in crew and tons of cargo in the air over WAIS. It was a beautiful sunny day here but on the ground at WAIS they found 35kt winds with blowing snow; no fun for putting up a tent in. So, they turned around…again.
For those of you who want to see pictures of our camp here at Siple Dome, I apologize. Outside of our Jamesway there really isn’t much to see that you can’t see here:
Except for piles of junk that we use to fuel planes and keep our grooming equipment going.
But, they say a picture says a thousand words which means, syllogistically, that a thousand words are just as good as a picture. So here are roughly a thousand words to descried our internet connection from top to bottom.
Now, an internet connection is a luxury that most in the western world take for granted these days. To have an internet connection requires certain infrastructural hardware that are omnipresent most everywhere; two in particular are power and a phone line. I am sure many of you have gathered by now that there is absolutely nothing here. What fossil resources we have here are precious. They are shipped to McMurdo once a year by the millions of gallons in the form of Mogas (gasoline) and the aviation fuels JP8 and AN8 which are, essentially, diesel fuel with anti-gelling additives. Here at Siple Dome we have Mogas and AN8. How does all the fuel we need to run the camp and fuel airplanes get here over 300 nautical miles from McMurdo? Like everything else here, it arrives by plane; the fuel arrives by the thousands of gallons stored in the wings of LC-130 Hercules. They have these dangly missile-looking things under their wings which are, in fact, auxiliary fuel tanks. At McMurdo, the plane takes on enough fuel to get it to Siple Dome or South Pole or wherever and the surplus gets pumped into massive bladders to be used however (we have a tiny 10,000 gallon bladder). This makes the fuel that finally arrives at its destination on the continent very precious indeed. To take fuel to South Pole, for example, it takes roughly three times more fuel to get to pole and back than they can carry as payload. Sorry, I can’t remember the exact numbers and, without a good internet connection, I can’t even look it up.
Oh, right I was trying to give a photographic impression of our internet connection. So, what does all this mumbo jumbo have to do with our internet connection? Nothing at all! It was just a ruse to increase my word count. In fact, our internet connection is 100% photovoltaic…powered by the sun. Considering that from September to February we have twenty four hours of the stuff, it would be ridiculous to have it any other way. True, we have two generators (a Honda 1K and 3K) that we can use to charge our battery bank if we have prolonged periods of overcast weather. But with two gel-celled 100 amp hour batteries, it takes a really long period to make us resort to them. We just do without.
Our two 12v batteries are wired parallel which gives us a DC current to use auto cigarette lighter plugs when possible. What current we don’t use directly we use alternated via a beautiful Statpower true sin-wave 1800watt inverter which changes the 12v DC to 110vAC to run all our other various household appliances From it we run a 30in TV, DVD/VCR, boom box, an Air-Ground band base station, hair clippers, electric razors, and about ten different battery chargers of varying types to name a few on our primary system. We also have secondary PV systems for the HF Radio base station, the (semi)-portable 10-99 HF radio, the vhf radio chargers, and the weather station.
So that takes care of the power for our internet connection; now to describe our phone line. At McMurdo, the large metropolis on the Ross Sea, they have telephone poles and lines strung all over town linking all the 200 or so buildings and Scott Base to one central Telco switching room which then beams an RF phone signal 40 miles across McMurdo Sound to Black Island, the liver of the USAP telecommunications system. From Black Island, phone calls (and therefore internet bandwidth) are beamed into the sky to then be bounced back to earth at the USAP’s telephone and internet information landing site in Brewster, Washington where they are disseminated to their various destinations nationwide. This is why, if any of you have ever had family or friends call you collect from McMurdo, chances are it showed up on your bill as a call from Brewster, Washington. There are exceptions to this routing, of course. For example, calls to New Zealand are handled differently though I am not sure how. The IT department at McMurdo are currently in the throes of changing the Stateside downlink to Denver, Colorado where the USAP has its main offices. But, that would be too much to have to explain in this, yet another ruse for more words to describe the dismal internet connection here at Siple Dome.
Now, as I said before, we are hundreds of miles from McMurdo. Well below the horizon and therefore far out of range of the McMurdo-Black Island internet and telecommunications (semi)super-highway. So what do we do here at Siple Dome without our own Black Island uplink-downlink station? Well, in the past, USAP Field Parties used strictly High Frequency (HF) radio transmitters to transmit voice data alone. HF signals have the ability to bend and bounce off the upper atmosphere extending their usable range by hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles at the expense of clarity of sound that a propagating VHF wave can carry. After the advent of the internet, field parties still had only HF radios which they used to send oral messages to MacOps (the radio communications liver of the McMurdo Station) who subsequently typed the messages in the body of an e-mail and sent it via IP. Picking up a piece of paper and writing a letter, barring extended periods of bad weather, makes for a nicer message that the whole USAP has not heard first.
So the HF Radio is still the primary form of communication for field parties in Antarctica. But, in the mid-1990 there was a (semi)revolution that has not-yet-replaced-but-only-supplemented field party communications in Antarctica: the Iridum satellite phone. An Iridium atom has an atomic number of 154 (or is it 77, how can I know with only half an internet connection) which is (semi) precisely how many satellites the upstart company launched into space throughout the mid-nineties; in a non-polar orbit I might add, so that remote locations like the Sahara and the polar ice caps could have telephony. The price tag for such a system obviously puts it out of range of the average joe (10s of 1000s of dollars for a subscription plus upwards of 7 dollars a minute call time) so the company went under and was bailed out by government agencies; the only people who could really benefit from such a service anyway. So now we get unlimited calls but can’t send e-mail via a POP server because the DOD does not have enough liver to filter out all the spam such a service would generate (if any of you IT geeks know a work-around for this, I’m paying cash). So we have to use web-mail which, with a 7k connection gives me plenty of time to cut my fingernails, toenails, hair, lawn, whatever, but, because the line goes down every 7 minutes or so (damn non-polar orbit!), I can’t because I have to keep re-connecting and reloading. To top it all off, the dial-up software that comes with the Iridum Data Kit is worthless. It is called the Apollo Emulator and I am beginning to believe more and more what it emulates is the software used to send data from the Apollo missions of the 60s. I guess I can’t complain, I don’t foot the bill and I don’t have to dictate messages to MacOps.
Oh crap, I over-shot my thousand words. Got a good picture? No? Fine, here’s a picture of me sipping tea in the Sahara..er…South Polar plateau.
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That took me a grand total of eight re-connects to upload. Enjoy.
Luke