Satellites provide a great digital transmission medium, but they are kind of expensive to launch, so companies have been looking for something already up there off which to bounce digital messages that are low volume and not crucially time-dependent, and lighted on the clouds of dust that the 2,000m or so meteors that enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day trail behind them: according to the Wall Street Journal, Broadcom Inc, Mahwah, New Jersey has just received a patent on a system that uses a series of antennas, low-power radio transceivers and control software that scans the skies to focus on a passing meteor; the company says that it has achieved brief transmissions between Mahwah and Waterbury, Vermont every 30 seconds and reckons it can get that down to four seconds; Indonesia is interested in the system for long-distance data transmission, and Conrail is considering it for keeping track of its thousands of railway trucks.
