A demo featuring Project54 datacasting software was displayed at the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters convention. Last year, Project54 collaborated with the New Hampshire Public Televisionin a study to evaluate the application of one version of the technology to law enforcement problems. At this year’s NAB convention, Harris Corporation demonstrated the Project54 software and a new version of the datacasting technology, called MPH. You can read more about the Project54 demo and MPH at the NAB convention here and here. For more on the Project54 work on datacasting, take a look at Professor Kent Chamberlin’s webpage. Professor Chamberlin is the leader of the datacasting team at UNH.

Brian Shepperd, NHPTV’s Director of Engineering and Information Technology, snapped some great photosof the demo at the convention. Here’s one of Brian with the laptop running the Project54 datacasting software.

Thanks for the photos Brian and, more importantly, thanks for collaborating with us!

Andrew Kun

Last week UNH ECE graduate student Benjamin McMahon defended his MS thesis. Ben is a member of the Project54 lab and he worked with Professor Kent Chamberlin on issues related to datacasting technology for law enforcement mobile units (e.g. see this post by Ben). For his thesis Ben worked on simulating designs of receiver antennas for datacasting mobile units.

Over the last couple of years Ben has been an excellent contributor at Project54. One result of his effort is that he has accumulated eight hockey pucks for papers submitted and published in peer-reviewed publications. (In the Project54 lab students and staff receive hockey pucks in recognition of their work on publications.)

Thanks for the hard work Ben!

Andrew Kun

Have you seen the 80s movie WarGames? Well, I’m old enough to have seen it in the movies. Here’s the trailer:

Here’s why I ask if you’ve seen this movie. Kent Chamberlin, Erika Clifford and I were discussing ongoing and future datacasting technology evaluations by Project54 at UNH. We’re interested in using datacasting in first responder operations. One aspect of the evaluations is finding out where, and under what conditions (weather, moving or stationary receiver, etc), can the datacasting signal be received. Here’s a post that discusses work using stationary receivers on how weather events are related to datacasting reception. We’re currently planning a study evaluating a technology that allows receiving datacasting signals while moving, e.g. in a car. We plan to install datacasting receivers in vehicles and create coverage maps for (parts of) the state of New Hampshire.

It occured to me that this planned activity is very similar to wardriving. Wardriving refers to driving in search of Wi-Fi networks. The result is the map of an area with Wi-Fi networks shown. Wardriving was named after wardialing, the term used in WarGames, that means dialing a list of phone numbers in search of lines hooked to computer modems. Here’s what this looked like in the movie:

So, should we use “wardriving” to describe data collection for our datacasting work? Or maybe find another term? Also, I wonder if there are any wardriving maps of Durham, NH?

Andrew Kun