New RACHEL work. Satellites!

We’ve been working with RACHEL for a long time. We love their stuff and are huge supporters. We want to get the RACHEL collection in as many hands as possible. The only downside is that the content is MASSIVE (up to 120GB) and the material has a tendency to get out of date quickly, especially given that the contributors (Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg) all update so frequently.

Our updates have been coming tucked in suitcases packed onto DVD’s and USB drives. Obviously this is not an optimal solution.

In order to try to solve that problem, the RACHEL group is working with satellite technology to push updates to places that are bandwidth-challenged.

We’re proud to be the first to pilot their new distribution program. Norberto of the RACHEL group has donated a satellite radio and receiver to help push the RACHEL updates to us free of charge. I’m excited to say that today we got the first piece of this in place.

We got the equipment connected, worked with Aaron at OmniSat and got our first satellite signal. Once we got the signal, Aaron set up an email address for us. I sent an image of a purple flower to the email address using my 3G connection and within minutes, the file appeared in my satellite download queue. The transfer happened quickly, and I’m excited to say we’ve received our first satellite transmission!

Tomorrow, I hope to work more with the RACHEL team and see what’s next, but for now, we’ve got our Hello, World! (that nice purple flower), satellite style!