Show HN: Free Satellite Broadcasts of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg eBooks

8 points

12 years ago

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.

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