Stratos installed an Iridium OpenPort® high-bandwidth marine satcom system on the expedition’s 64-foot steel-hull sailboat, Ocean Watch. The system is providing voice and high-speed data connections throughout the 13-month, 25,000-mile circumnavigation of the North and South American continents. Around the Americas is a research expedition that will collect scientific data and test new methods and equipment – all to raise awareness of the precipitous changes that are occurring in the earth’s oceans and to promote solutions to mitigate those changes. Ten scientists from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory (UW-APL), the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO), RMR Co., MIT Sea Grant, NASA and Western Washington University have placed a diverse suite of instruments onboard Ocean Watch to monitor polar science, weather, jellyfish populations and solar-energy reflection, among other conservation projects.
Ocean Watch will sail around the American continents in a clockwise direction, transiting the Northwest Passage, sailing down the East Coast, around Cape Horn, and back up the West Coast, returning to Seattle in July 2010. Notably, this will be one of the first times a sailboat has navigated through the Northwest Passage from west to east. Over the course of the voyage, Ocean Watch will visit 30 ports in 11 countries, where the crew will host media events and educational programs for local schools to educate citizens about issues affecting conservation of the earth’s oceans. A real-time map of the voyage can be found at www.aroundtheamericas.org, as can information on Ocean Watch, the crew, the expedition’s partners and more. The Iridium OpenPort terminal has three independent phone circuits and a separate high-speed data port with scalable rates of 9.6 to 128 kbps. The lightweight, omni-directional antenna array is about the size of a typical small boat radar radome. It contains no moving parts, which greatly reduces cabling, installation and maintenance costs.
