This communications company is a lifeline for far-flung operators

Date:
Thu, 10 Aug 2023 13:02:31 +0000

Description:
Ard Su for Popular Science A firm called Everywhere offers a way for workers in extremely remote settings to stay in touch. The post This communications company is a lifeline for far-flung operators appeared first on Popular Science .

FULL STORY ======================================================================
Ard Su for Popular Science

In Overmatched , we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industrythe world of soldiers and spies.

YOURE STANDING at the top of a mountain, elated to have reached the summit. But when you reach into your pack for some water, your foot gets wedged between two rocks, and you fall and crack your ankle. While youre not dead, you definitely cant hike down. You need help. Luckily, you have an SOS
device: a little piece of technology that can communicate with satellites to send a cry for help, along with your location and maybe a text or two, to authorities. Teams mobilize to come get you.

In this hypothetical scenario, you were in the backcountry for recreationto have fun. But satellite communication and tracking arent useful just for hikers, hunters, and mountaineers who have no cell signal. Its also important for those doing their jobs in the kinds of wild, harsh environments that
could otherwise leave them incommunicado: people like those on search-and-rescue teams who would help an injured hiker, as well as miners, forestry technicians, wildland firefighters, and soldiers.

To make communication easier for all those folks, a company called Everywhere Communications has brought together services from two powerhouses of the industryIridium, maker of satellites, and Garmin, maker of GPS devicesto create a secure system that organizations can use to track and communicate with extremely remote employees and assets. If you did, in fact, crack your ankle on a peak, the search-and-rescue team that would mobilize might use Everywhere to help themselves help you. Today, the company has 300 customers, including the US government and the US national parks. Global SOS

Patrick Shay, who founded Everywhere Communications in 2016 along with a core team, has a long history in the finding-things and communications spaces. Earlier in his career, while working at Motorola and Sirius, Shay was instrumental in putting SOS buttons in cars, the first being a fancy one: a $100,000 S-Class Mercedes. After that, he joined Iridium. Iridium, initially funded by Motorola, created and launched a constellation of communications satellites and the bulky satellite phones you may have seen in 90s movies.

Finally, Shay joined a company called DeLorme, which created inReach, an SOS device that allows its users to track themselves, call for help, and send messages to civilization. In 2016, Garmin bought DeLorme and thus acquired inReach. But the device, and most commercial satellite communications tech today, tends to end up in the hands of outdoorsy recreators rather than
people with dirty and dangerous jobs such as those in defense. Shay wanted to reach out to that latter segment. At Everywhere, we focus on exclusively government and business, he says. That includes the business of search and rescue.

But he didnt want to start from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel when its already rolling around? So Everywhere formed a partnership with Garmin, which by then owned the inReach technology whose development Shay had been a part of. The inReach device looks like a diminutive walkie-talkie, and in its smallest form, the burnt-orange-and-black device weighs just 3.5 ounces and measures 4 inches tall by 2 inches wide.

We were incredibly fortunate because we do business with our old friends,
says Shay of his colleagues from DeLorme. Those friends allowed Everywhere to take off-the-shelf versions of inReach and add firmware that makes it secure and encrypted enough for professional and government use and also lets operators erase all the data remotely if a device gets lost. The reason that happened, says Shay, of the partnership and device modifications, was because of personal relationships and history.

Those security features were necessary if Everywhere was to appeal to the feds, because traditional satellite communicationsincluding those of the Iridium constellation, on which Everywhere relieshave historically been
simple to hack, allowing clever eavesdroppers to intercept communications .

The software, too, needed amping up to appeal to this new crowd, so
Everywhere has created code that operates differently from what youd interact with as a civilian carrying a device like a Garmin inReach on a peak-bagging quest. Most important is the Everywhere Hub, a web-based portal that
functions like an incident command center or a security operations centerthe place with all the information that directs the people in the field. Thats that room with all the TVs on the wall, says Shay. And one of those TVs is a picture of the world with a bunch of blinking dots and lights. Those little lights are the team members. If somebody in Yemen pushes an SOS button, its going to light up on that screen, Shay continues.

These arent totally new capabilities, but Everywhere combined them into one package rather than requiring a hodgepodge of services and gadgets. The companys innovation is taking existing hardware, modifying it for security, and linking it with Everywheres own professional software backbone.

The software also has capabilities your average casual elk hunter wouldnt need. For instance, a person using the Everywhere Hub can create a geofence, essentially a boundary in space and time. When, say, a soldier or miner
enters or leaves that specific area during that specific time, the command center gets an alert. Those soldiers and miners could also send large amounts of information back to base, or to each other, like data regarding which streets are flooded or where a sensitive material like uranium is. And anyone driving a secured vehiclebe that a car full of cash or the lead vehicle in a security convoycould be tracked along their route. Home base can also
schedule check-ins for workersmeaning they dont have to be tracked all the time. A satellite constellation

All that connection is possible because of the Iridium satellite constellation66 spacecraft in orbitand cellular network. Together, they provide coverage for the whole planet, all the time, so no matter where you are, you can communicate if you have a device like the inReach. Iridium also allows a device to transmit information about its locationinformation the device gathers from GPS satellites. The GPS satellites do the pinpointing,
but communications satellites relay those pinpoints. Like SpaceXs Starlink internet satellites, the Iridium spacecraft live in low Earth orbit, around 500 miles from Earth, so signals like those to and from an inReach can whiz back and forth quickly, without the lag time caused by more distant orbits.

While Iridium does make its own communications and tracking devices, it also sells chips and antennas to other outfits, like Garmin, so they can implant those in their devices, or stick them to their assets, allowing their own technology to enable a connection from the satellites.

Other networks were going after who can provide the fastest internet pipe to your home or remote cabin, says Matt Desch, Iridiums CEO. We werent going after that. Thats not what we do.

Instead, Iridium aims to provide extremely mobile connections, like those
that firefighters, miners, soldiers, and searchers would need as they roam in the field and use Everywheres services. More than 60,000 aircraftincluding medevac helicopters whose position and ability to communicate are lifesaving, not just vacation-enablingalso have Iridium chips inside. Iridiums network also guides autonomous vehicles on land, by sea, or in the air. For example, Swoop Aeros drones use it above the ground, and SailDrones uncrewed boats use it on the surface of the ocean.

Military or aid organizations can also stick sensors on, say, pallets of food and water to make sure they get delivered to their intended destination, or use the antennas to send, for example, weather and seismic information from ground sensors to an intelligence outfit halfway across the world. The
ability to do such data transfer is especially important, militarily, in the Arctic: Near the top of the Earthwhere missile warning and air surveillance are prime activitiessatellite comms are really the only option. And when
teams are completing missions, or helping deliver aid, an organization can
use a software-hardware combo system like Everywhere to watch the boots on
the ground from the comfort of the incident command room and to send a text if, say, someone looks stuck.

People have typically gone to areas like distant summits to be a little
alone, to disappear for a while, to feel self-sufficient, and, maybe, to not be tracked. But when people need rescuing, the ability to call for help and say where to send it can trump that desire for solitude. And when youre out thereor in a combat zone without cell service, or on a cross-conflict trek with no infrastructure, or deep in a mine or forestfor work, a bit of job security, in the more literal sense of the word, can be lifesaving.

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Link to news story: https://www.popsci.com/technology/everywhere-communications/


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