Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
Previous
Next
Using balloons to boost cellphone coverage in North Dakota
This story about North Dakota planning to test balloons as a method of extending cellphone service caught my eye because of the book I’m working on about Saskatchewan engineering projects of note. In the late 1970s a SaskTel engineer proposed that it should be possible to use a string of hot-air balloons, rather like tethered communications satellites, to increase long-distance capacity. The idea was (if you’ll pardon the expression) shot down.
Perhaps it was just ahead of its time. After all, a lot of people were leery of this newfangled thing called fibre optics when it was first proposed. Fortunately, SaskTel went ahead with that, and in the 1980s had the world’s largest fibre-optic network. The company is still a world leader in the field of fibre-optic technology.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2006/01/using-balloons-to-boost-cellphone-coverage-in-north-dakota/
