Airborne Communications

Imagine instant cell-phone coverage anywhere. Or full streaming broadband video to any first res-ponder or military personnel who needs it.  Consider the implications of fully controllable unmanned vehicles swarming throughout land, sea and air. Can you imaging a situation where there is almost no practical limit to radio connectivity or the bandwidth available to anybody, anywhere? This is the Helikite communication revolution.

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Long range. Vast coverage. High bandwidth. Low Cost.

Radio waves hate the ground but love the sky. Free of the power-sapping earth, radio signals emitted from low cost, easy to use Helikites can travel hundreds of times further with extreme clarity. Allsopp Helikites has been in the forefront of high altitude radio-relay trials for many years, testing many new radio-relays and waveforms. The quality of reception has to be seen & heard to be believed. Low power, high-bandwidth, line-of-sight radio signals, such as Wi-Fi that only travel a few hundred yards on the ground, will easily & very reliably travel many miles when re-transmitted from radio-relays flying at good altitude on a Helikite. This is hard for even experienced radio operators to understand, as most are only used to the very limited line-of-sight achieved by masts. Our research & experience has proven a simple rule:  “See and Speak”.

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See and Speak

3,000ft altitude in 3 minutes = over 20,000 sq miles coverage.

“See and Speak” means that, as a general rule, if you can see the Helikite in the sky, you can get reception. This holds good for Cell-phone, Wi-Fi, Mobile Ad-Hoc Radio Networks (MANET), broadband, video, VHF, UHF, HF etc. High gain antennas are seldom required. How far away the Helikite can be seen depends upon the terrain and local vegetation.

As a rule-of-thumb, in typical rolling English countryside, an altitude of just 600ft will give 6 miles range which equals about 113 sqare miles of coverage. Fly the radio-relay up to 3000ft above the sea & the line-of-sight is 80 miles, which will give an astounding 20,108 sq miles.

For most applications on land, flying at 1000ft for about 30 miles line-of-sight and 2,827 sq miles will do exceedingly well. This may see a long way, but it is nothing for radio-waves and easy for Helikites too. Consider the link-budget of a geosynchronous satellite phone. This tiny signal is travelling 22,000 miles to the satellite where the radio signal is minuscule compared to what reaches a Helikite from a Wi-Fi radio.  A Helikite is like a hugely powerful, very low Earth orbit satellite, put up wherever and whenever required - by anybody.

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Mobile Phones

Instant Long-Range Cell-Phone Towers
Helikites can lift phone tower. Pico-cells to create a mobile phone network capable of servicing thousands of Smartphones over hundreds of square miles. This will require a Helikite of 34 cu metres or over. Using the Helibase system transportable in a Jeep, these Helikites can be deployed in any weather, from a green-field site within 20 minutes. Smartphone applications can be used by the military, emergency services, disaster relief, music concerts, sports events, and unmanned vehicles. The ease of use and worldwide familiarity of mobile phones is a huge advantage in many situations.