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Show HN: Free Satellite Broadcasts of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg eBooks
For the last 6-months, we've been working on a way to offer free access to content that is normally found online. We are now live and broadcasting data to all of North America, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (it's an MVP, so a very tiny channel). By October we will be on 7 different satellites and will have full global coverage. The link and video below offers a quick overview on the components and process necessary to receive Outernet's signal. The video in the link shows the user's equipment and system in action. If you already have a Ku-band dish and receiver, you can see our blinking logo on Galaxy 19 and Hotbird.
North America: Galaxy 19 (97.0°W) 12,177 V 23,000 3/4
Europe: HotBird (13.0°E) 11,470 V 27,500 5/6
If you have a DVB-S tuner from the following list and a Raspberry Pi, the GitHub-page has instructions on how to put your own ORx (Outernet receiver) together.
https://www.outernet.is/pages/how-to
https://github.com/Outernet-Project/orx-install/blob/master/README.mkd
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S_USB_Devices
Note: this is not free internet access. The best technical description is free-to-air satellite IP multicast. Unlike commercial datacasting providers, our broadcast stream can be decoded by consumer-grade tuners and receivers. We are currently using a $40 Linux-friendly DVB-S tuner, Raspberry Pi, and $8 wifi dongle. Of course, a Ku-band dish and LNB are also needed, but these two pieces are locally available for $50 in basically every corner of the globe.
Our next project is to interface the DVB-S tuner directly with any hackable wifi router. Eventually, we hope to release a tuner/wifi router for less than $50.
- rahimnathwani 12y agoThis looks awesome! So if someone installs this, will they eventually have a local copy of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg on their SD card or USB device? If so, I have a few questions: - how long does it take to get the whole lot? - what if the hard drive fills up? can someone choose to get only a portion or selected files, so that other files don't fill up the storage first? - what happens when there are updates to Wikipedia articles? Are the new articles broadcast as you find them, or do we wait for the carousel to complete? - is the goal to move beyond static-ish content? If not, then aren't hard drives or DVD-R disks easier?
- syedkarim 12y agoCorrect, this broadcast provides offline versions of websites and distributes static files. --We can go up to 50 Mbps, but right now it's 50 kbps; it's just a matter of spending more for bandwidth. The entire Wikipedia HTML download is something like 250 GB. I haven't done the math, but at dial-up speeds, I'm guessing about a week to get the entire encyclopedia. With our own transponder running at 50 Mbps, that we could deliver 500 GB of content per day. --Yes, Librarian is the software that handles this. What you described is not currently available, but it's on the feature list. https://github.com/Outernet-Project/librarian https://github.com/Outernet-Project/librarian --Our thinking right now is that new versions of a set will be updated with additional passes of the carousel, but this is definitely a work in progress. --Hard drives are cheaper and provide greater disk space (and external USB drives would work just fine), but they are also more expensive than an 8 GB jump drive. But that's really a user-defined component; if they want to save more content, they add more storage.