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Oooooooooooo. I bet that's how satellite radios get their firmware updates and stuff. Actually I bet it's how they get almost everything aside from the audio
by myself248 2mo ago
Oooooooooooo.
I bet that's how satellite radios get their firmware updates and stuff.
Actually I bet it's how they get almost everything aside from the audio streams themselves. Metadata. Channel art. Subscription info. Traffic data. Weather maps. Receiver firmware... The satellite is a textbook-perfect fountain, and the receiver may tune in at any time during the stream, and may miss any random number of packets, but fairly quickly it has what it needs.
I believe the various categories of metadata are sent at different rates according to how promptly a newly-awakened receiver should be able to update itself, so what's actually on the air is an interleaved collection of fountain streams, yeah? Hmm.
- inigyou 2mo agoI bet they don't, because they didn't know about it or didn't think of it. I know GPS is a slow repeating stream (the ephemeris repeats every 30 seconds and the almanac every 12.5 minutes) but that probably came before fountain codes.
- cwmoore 2mo agoSpeculation about the past is probably unnecessary. Reed-Solomon/erasure codes have been in operations since the 1960s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_cor...