I’m thrilled to announce that I’m up for two Aurora Awards this year! Fireboy is on the ballot for Best Young Adult Novel, and The Worldshapers is once again on the ballot for Best Fan …
I spent a good chunk of today at Wordbridge, the annual writers’ conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. My main reason for coming was to launch a Shadowpaw Press title (Broken Realm by Jenna Greene, a Lethbridge …
This is Easter weekend; last weekend, I sang in the Easter concert of First Baptist Church here in Regina as a guest soloist and chorister. The whole concert is worth listening to, but if you’d …
I put a link to this in the previous post on my Aurora-eligible work for 2025, but wanted to highlight it. This was my contribution to the Shapers of Worlds Volume V anthology, and it …
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s best-known science fiction and fantasy awards, voted on by fans every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to win twice, for Marseguro (DAW Books) (soon coming out in a new edition from Tuscany …
Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
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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/
