Welcome to HiSeasNet

8 May 2008: The Oregon State University, College of Oceanic & Atmospheric Science's 184-foot research vessel, R/V Wecoma, joined HiSeasNet on 6 May 2008 as it began passing traffic across the SatMex 5 beam 1 satellite following the installation of the SeaTel 6006 1.5m antenna. R/V Wecoma shares a 192kbps/64kbps link with R/V Point Sur and R/V Oceanus.

3 March 2008: Steve Foley (SIO) and Karl Kapusta (Comm Systems) just finished administering the first ever HiSeasNet Tech Training course at WHOI. They spent four days, 25-28 February 2008, training 14 ship techs from URI, WHOI, and the University of Delaware about satellite communications, the HiSeasNet antenna systems, and the data layer that connects the ships to the internet. With a borrowed 4006 unit (kindly loaned by NOAA) sitting on the floor in front of the attendees and the Oceanus just outside, a large amount of material—including five years of experience with HiSeasNet—was covered in four days. The students received background, theory, hands-on skills, and had many questions answered. Their feedback produced many good ideas to improve future sessions. Course evaluations concur in their positive assessment of both Steve and Karl as trainers.

4 February 2008: For Better or Worse, Modern Ocean Explorers Stay Connected (pdf)
By Pien Huang, Special to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, provided to LiveScience in partnership with the NSF

On a six-week business trip last winter, Cassandra Lopez posted updates to her friends on Facebook, and conversed with her family on Gmail chat. What made these interactions unique was that Cassandra was on-location in the Southern Ocean, writing oceanography articles from one of the world’s most remote places. 24/7 internet access on research vessels attracts a new type of oceanographer – those who want to get away from it all, but also blog about it.

Cassandra was aboard the R/V Roger Revelle, a vessel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego in La Jolla, Calif. Like most large ships of its generation, it comes with advanced communication systems, as well as crew members devoted to technical support.

The satellite system on the R/V Roger Revelle enables it to better serve as a laboratory for scientific research by providing constant internet access. It also has the byproduct of helping seagoing researchers and crew members maintain relationships back home.

On top of a fairly consistent email service, several crew members maintain blogs to tell friends and family about their shipboard experiences. Joe Ferris, a Second Mate, recently posted on travel plans, piracy evasion, navigation, and working out.

Resident Technician Dave Langner takes advantage of the real-time camera system, which uploads snapshots from the ship to a San Diego database every ten minutes, to keep in touch with his mother. “Sometimes I’ll email her just before I go on deck,” he says, “and she can see me working from her computer screen.”

Veterans of ship life say that communication has improved dramatically in the past two decades. Acoustics specialist Jules Hummon recalls that when she first started going to sea in 1988, images were faxed via satellite-linked modems, and it took half an hour to transmit a page-long image of sea surface temperatures. On her first trip, she was billed by the kilobyte for two personal faxes – a letter from her mother, and a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from her husband. They cost her over $100 to receive. These days, she can download reasonably-sized images through email, using the HiSeasNet satellite connection at no additional cost.

These improvements have come about as a result of two innovative, long-term projects based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and funded by NSF, the Office of Naval Research, and universities in the Joint Oceanographic Institutions: HiSeasNet, which has built an infrastructure to provide constant high-speed internet to research vessels via satellite, and the ROADNet, an accompanying network that makes images and sensor data available to anybody with internet as it is being collected.

Still, the ability to stay connected to land is a mixed blessing for oceanographers, who appreciate the relative simplicity of life at sea. In a survey taken of scientists and crew members on the R/V Revelle’s CLIVAR I8S expedition last March, most respondents echoed the sentiment of Chief Scientist Jim Swift, who listed “getting away from the distractions of professional life” as one of ship time’s primary appeals. Chris Measures, a trace metals scientist and oceanography professor, finds that better communication has increased his responsibilities at sea. Besides being constantly on-call for the six weeks of CLIVAR I8S, he was in charge of coordinating a grant proposal with researchers in the U.S., India, and Italy, which he submitted by shipboard email.

The improved capacity for communication has also brought the interruptions of personal life. Seagoers fret about termite infestations and errors in bills and pet sicknesses that they can do nothing about, barring their physical presence. Furthermore, the inconsistency of satellite connections makes it difficult to have relationships with those onshore, as the expectations of communication are hard to fulfill. On a four-week trip off the coast of Indonesia, resident technician Dave Langner wondered if a relationship was floundering. “She hadn’t responded to some important emails I had sent,” he said. “It turns out she just hadn’t received them.” Second Mate Joe Ferris, who spends five to seven months at sea every year, doesn’t bother: “I only date when I’m not working,” he says.

The oceanographer tends to fall on the adventurous end of the personality spectrum, but the demands of the oceangoing lifestyle remain at odds with the standard urge to settle down. After more than a decade of traveling out of a ship’s berth to exotic locales, Joe Ferris is thinking seriously about buying property and moving his things out of storage. Few give it up completely, but many cut down in their ship time as they move into the patterns of a more stable life – buying homes, finding partners, having children. Lynne Talley, a professor and researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, spent much of the ‘90’s at sea, but she now devotes her time to teaching and writing on campus to stay closer to her family.

Frequent emailing may not fully substitute for being at home, but it is remarkable that shipboard communications have evolved such that new oceanographers can compare sea time to business trips made by their friends in marketing and consulting. “Many careers require travel,” says Cliff Buck, a graduate student at Florida State University. “I don’t really see this lifestyle as being all that unusual.”

28 September 2007: The University of Miami's 96-foot local-class vessel, R/V Walton Smith, joined HiSeasNet on 27 September 2007 after the successful installation of the 1m SeaTel 4006 Ku-band system. R/V Walton Smith joins three other ships on the SatMex 5 beam 2 Ku-band satellite. All four vessels benefit from 256kbps of shared shore-to-ship bandwidth with 64kbps ship-to-shore bandwidth.

14 September 2007: HiSeasNet has successfully added service on SatMex 5 beam 1 to supply connectivity to ships traveling further north along both coasts. The new carriers are 128kbps shore-to-ship and 64kbps ship-to-shore and will be used initially by R/V Point Sur and R/V New Horizon as they travel north to Washington state for work in the PLUSNET project. This brings HiSeasNet to its 5th satellite transponder: SatMex5 beams 1 and 2 over North America, Intelsat 701 over the Pacific Ocean, Intelsat 707 over the Atlantic Ocean, and Intelsat 906 over the Indian Ocean.

29 June 2007: Welcome aboard to the folks at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Their vessel, the R/V Point Sur, joined HiSeasNet today. This is the second installation of the smaller SeaTel 4006 1m dish, and the first one on the west coast. Service is provided through the SatMex 5 Ku-band satellite. MLML is operated by a consortium of seven California State University campuses (Fresno, Hayward, Monterey Bay, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Stanislaus).

SHIP	OPERATING INSTITUTION	LENGTH (ft.)
LARGE/GLOBAL Class
* MELVILLE	Scripps Institution of Oceanography	279
* KNORR	Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution	279
* THOMAS G. THOMPSON	University of Washington	274
* ROGER REVELLE	Scripps Institution of Oceanography	274
* ATLANTIS	Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution	274
* MARCUS G. LANGSETH	Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory	239
INTERMEDIATE/OCEAN Class
* SEWARD JOHNSON	Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution	204
* KILO MOANA	University of Hawaii	185
WECOMA	Oregon State University	185
* ENDEAVOR	University of Rhode Island	184
* OCEANUS	Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution	177
* NEW HORIZON	Scripps Institution of Oceanography	170
REGIONAL Class
* POINT SUR	Moss Landing Marine Laboratories	135
CAPE HATTERAS	Duke University/UNC	135
ROBERT GORDON SPROUL	Scripps Institution of Oceanography	125
HUGH R. SHARP	University of Delaware	120
ATLANTIC EXPLORER	Bermuda Biological Station for Research	115
* PELICAN	Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium	105
* HiSeasNet • Pending HiSeasNet

26 April 2007: R/V Langseth (operated by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory [LDEO]) joined HiSeasNet—with a C-band connection through the Atlantic satellite—on 25 April 2007 while in port in Galveston, Texas. The 2.4m SeaTel antenna was installed quickly and demonstrates improvements that have been made by SeaTel recently. This installation brings all of the Global and Ocean class UNOLS vessels into HiSeasNet.

Oceanus-Satellites 27 March 2007: R/V Oceanus joined HiSeasNet 27 March 2007 while in port in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Shortly following the hardware installation of a SeaTel 6006 antenna 24 March, the ship successfully demonstrated it could route data via its HiSeasNet Ku-band connnection to the SatMex5 satellite. This regional class ship is the third WHOI vessel to become part of the network in the last few years.

14 February 2007: HiSeasNet has inagurated service in the Indian Ocean region via Intelsat IS-906 satellite at 64ûE. operating through Intelsat's Fuchsstadt, Germany teleport. Communications for the Indian Ocean region are routed onto the Internet through the HiSeasNet hub at UCSD with the rest of the ships' traffic. R/V Roger Revelle, at 64S, 110E, went out of range of the Pacific Ocean satellite on Saturday, and picked up a connection to Intelsat's IS-906 satellite on the evening of February 13, 2007. This transition marks the first time that HiSeasNet has had a ship move between not only oceans, but earth stations and providers. Despite a 2 day outage as the ship steamed into range of the new bird, the transition went fairly smoothly given the number of small details involved.

With service on Intelsat's IS-707 at 307ûE and IS-701 at 180, operating through the San Diego hub, HiSeasNet is now global.

17 AUGUST 2006: R/V Pelican, operated by Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is now online via HiSeasNet. Pelican utilizes a SeaTel 4006 1m Ku-band antenna. Internet traffic is passing through a SatMex 5 to the HiSeasNet earth station that sits on top of the San Diego Supercomputer Center's primary building. Traffic plots are available online here.

12 JUNE 2006: EOS's 2 May 2006 issue features an article that highlights HiSeasNet presence on all but two ships in the Universities National Oceanographic Laboratories System (UNOLS) fleet. Excerpt below:

HiSeasNet, the communications network providing full-period Internet access for the U.S. academic ocean research fleet, is an enabling technology that is changing the way oceanography is done in the 21st century...In addition to the familiar IP services—such as e-mail, telnet, ssh, rlogin, Web traffic, and ftp—HiSeasNet can move real-time audio and video traffic across the satellite links. Phone systems onboard research ships can be connected to their home institutions’ phone exchanges. Video teleconferencing with the current 96 kilobits per second circuits supports compressed video frame rates at about 10 frames per second, allowing for effective conversations and demonstrations with ship-to-shore video.

Eos, Vol. 87, No. 18, 2 May 2006. Download the article as a pdf. © AGU 2006.

The 2 May 2006 article prompted the following remarks from Dr. Vic Delnore, NASA Science Directorate:

From morse code to HiSeasNet, communicating with research vessels at sea has certainly come a long way since the summer of 1960 when each morning I hiked the steep incline above La Jolla Shores Drive. There I would find A. B. "Nick" Carter, a colorful character with a big white handlebar mustache, already on the key exchanging messages with Scripps' ships in all corners of the globe.

As the recipient of an NSF award for high school students to spend the summer at a science institution, I was assigned to SIO's coastal radio station WWD. Using morse code on several shortwave frequencies, WWD was the sole means of communication between the La Jolla campus and the ships at sea...On some days Nick and I drove down to the Embarcadero on San Diego's waterfront to install radio gear on the R/V Argo, then undergoing conversion from Navy use. (Argo was sister to Woods Hole's R/V Chain.) This was my first experience with an oceanographic research vessel, something that I was to see a lot of during the next decades!

What a happy summer for a kid just starting to explore horizons beyond high school! The other NSF awardees at Scripps worked in the labs and libraries, but I got to handle the message traffic between those labs and researchers on far-away expeditions, so of course my imagination ran wild! I learned radio and also something of navigation, just so I could figure out where each ship was and thus which way to swing our beam antenna. This early preparation later widened my opportunities in oceanography-like many other researchers in this field I came to feel as much at home on the bridge and radio room of a ship as on the fantail or in the wet lab. That summer at Scripps taught me both ends of ship to shore communications, and also the vital link that lay between.

28 MARCH 2006: Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution's R/V SEWARD JOHNSON joins HiSeasNet. Installation and commissioning of the HiSeasNet C-Band system on the Seward Johnson was completed in March, 2006 and marks the 9th UNOLS ship to be outfitted with HiSeasNet, providing continuous Internet connectivity to these ships. This vessel, namesake of HARBOR BRANCH founder J. Seward Johnson, Sr., is a 204-foot Oceanographic and Submersible-Support Research Vessel that was built in 1984, commissioned in 1985 and extensively rebuilt and stretched in 1994. With an 6000 nautical mile range and a speed of 13 knots, the vessel is capable of traveling and working in any of the world's oceans, while accommodating up to 40 people.

17 OCTOBER 2005: HiSeasNet is now providing Internet services to the IRIS/IDA Global Seismographic Network station HOPE (www.ida.ucsd.edu) on South Georgia Island (www.sgisland.org) in the south Atlantic and to the resident scientific community. This service is supported by the British Antarctic Survey (www.antarctica.ac.uk) and IRIS (www.IRIS.edu) with contractor CommSystems of Carlsbad, CA (www.comm-systems.com).

3 OCTOBER 2005: EOS's 13 September 2005 issue features an article that highlights HiSeasNet presence on R/V Knorr. The authors (Deborah K. Smith and Peter Lemmond) contend that HiSeasNet is an an invaluable tool for ship to shore real time reasearch:

The availability of HSN on this cruise was invaluable. Because of changing ship schedules, project principal investigator Smith was not able to sail on the ship. Nevertheless, she was able to participate and direct the project in a way that was not envisioned, or possible, when the cruise was originally proposed and funded.As far as we know, this is the first time a survey has been directed from both ship and shore in real time.

Eos, Vol. 86, No. 37, 13 September 2005. Download the article as a pdf. © AGU 2005

12 SEPTEMBER 2005: HDTV from Beneath the Sea: Global Access to Real-Time Deep-Sea Vent Oceanography

Real-time, uncompressed, high-definition video from deep-sea, high temperature venting systems (2.2 km, ~ 360 °C) associated with active underwater volcanoes off the Washington-British Columbia coastlines, will be transmitted from the seafloor robot JASON to the Research Vessel Thompson through an electro-optical tether. An on-board engineering-production crew will deliver a live HD program using both shipboard and live sub-sea HD imagery. This program will be encoded in real-time in MPEG-2 HD format, and will be delivered to shore via the Galaxy 10R communication satellite using the HiSeasNet shipboard system modified to accommodate these high data rates. A specialized shipboard ‘HD-SeaVision’ system developed by the University of Washington (UW) and ResearchChannel provides the interface for the HDTV signals.

The MPEG-2 HD satellite signal will be downlinked and decoded at the University of Washington in Seattle. The resulting uncompressed HD stream will be mixed in real-time with live two-way discussion and HD imagery from participating, land-based researchers working in a studio with undergraduates, K-12 students, and teachers. This integrated stream will be transmitted at 1.5gb/s to Calit2 at University of California,m San Diego, for an iGrid Demo on 28 and 29 September at 1400-1500 Pacific Time. The transmission will utilize the ResearchChannel's iHD1500 uncompressed HD/IP software on a PacificWave Lambda over National LambdaRail. Multicast HD streams of the same production will be simultaneously transmitted as 20 Mb/s (MPEG-2) and 6 Mb/s (Windows Media 9) streams.

Challenges of this effort include: operating high-definition video in extreme ocean depths amid corrosive, dynamic vent plumes, capturing and processing the video aboard ship, potentially coping with adverse weather, configuring and using satellite links for transmission, and transferring signals from the associated downlink site to a land-based IP network. The RV Thompson’s HiSeasNet system was converted from C- to KU- band for this operation, and special high-speed modems were added to accommodate the 1.5 Gbps signal.

This appears to be the first live HDTV transmission by cable, from the deep seafloor-to-ship, coupled in real-time with a ship-satellite-shore HD link that will be distributed to a broad community of land-based viewers via IP networks.

This mission is an early demonstration of next-generation capabilities being explored for NSF’s Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks (ORION) Program, one potential example being the US-Canadian NEPTUNE Project. The demo will feature on-going research and education supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Ocean Sciences Division and former Division of Shared Cyber-infrastructure of NSF. Additional support was provided by NOAA’s Coastal Science Center, UCSD’s Calit2, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The HD activity is partially sponsored by an NSF-funded Project known as the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge INtegration Grid (LOOKING); it is configured to explore the requisite cyber-infrastructure necessary to support routine, remote Ocean and Earth Science/Education of the future.

The Principal Investigator for this project is John Delaney of the University of Washington, USA. Collaborators include:

University of Washington: Deborah Kelley, Ron Johnson, Ed Lazowska, Mark Stoermer
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD: John Orcutt, Jon Berger, Atul Nayak
Calit2, UCSD: Larry Smarr, Matthew Arrott
Pacific Northwest GigaPop: Jan Eveleth
Calit2, UCSD, and Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago: Tom DeFanti
ResearchChannel: Michael Wellings, James DeRoest, Amy Philipson, Christopher Latham

Endeavor with SeaTel Antenna Being Installed

15 AUGUST 2005: 12 August 2005, R/V Endeavor became the first ship to pass data across the HiSeasNet Ku-Band antenna. The ship is now equipped with a 1.2m SeaTel 4996 antenna, connecting through SatMex5 to the 3.8m dish at the HiSeasNet Earth station. The ship is enjoying a 128bps shore-to-ship and 64kbps ship-to-shore link.

Knorr with SeaTel Antenna Installed

21 JUNE 2005: HiSeasNet is featured in the Oceanus article "Oceanographic Telecommuting," which explains how oceanographers are now conducting real time data analysis aboard the Knorr—from both ship and shore. Oceanus is the online research magazine of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (click here to read the article).

22 APRIL 2005: WHOI's R/V Knorr bagan passing traffic across HiSeasNet. This is the first ship to use the Atlantic satellite's 64kbps shore-to-ship link. (click here to view the traffic report).

Kilo Moana with SeaTel Antenna Installed

11 MARCH 2005: R/V Kilo Moana is now exchanging packets across the HiSeasNet satellite network via the Intelsat 701 Pacific Ocean satellite. The link hosts network traffic to the HiSeasNet Earth station, UH campus, and the rest of the internet, and includes a VoIP connection to UH campus.

1 MARCH 2005: The HiSeasNet Atlantic Hub goes into operation. A second 7m antenna was installed by CommSystems on the roof of the San Diego Supercomputer Center to provide HiSeasNet service to the southeastern Pacific and Atlantic ocean regions.

March 2005 antenna installation at SDSC

10 FEBRUARY 2005: The San Diego UT reported on Debra Brice's ability to video conference from the South Pole with her class at San Marcos Middle School via the HiSeasNet link to R/V Revelle. Click here to read the full article.

14 JANUARY 2005: R/V Atlantis, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, departed San Diego for Easter Island with her new SeaTel C-Band satellite system installed and commissioned. This system now provides the ships’ compliment with Internet and voice communications services through the HiSeasNet hub at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

NOVEMBER 2004: The HiSeasNet Hub Installation schedule is now available. Click here to download the pdf.

JULY 2004: NSF Funds Major Expansion of HiSeasNet: In July, 2004 NSF funded a large expansion of HiSeasNet through their Major Research Instrumentation program. This program required proposing institutions to provide matching funds for the equipment requested. These matching funds were provided through the collective effort of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of Hawaii (UH), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), and the University of Rhode Island (URI), all working together under the aegis of the Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI). JOI is a not-for-profit consortium of 20 major US academic oceanographic institutions.

According to SIO Principal Investigator Jonathan Berger, SIO will use these funds to:

Add systems for the R/V Kilo Moana, operated by UH, the R/V Maurice Ewing operated by the LDEO of Columbia University, the R/V Atlantis and R/V Knorr, operated by WHOI, the R/V Endeavor, operated by URI, and the R/V New Horizon, operated by SIO.
Install a second 7m Teleport antenna at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to extend coverage over the entire Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and a smaller antenna to provide Ku-band coverage for North American coastal waters and the Caribbean.
With funding from ONR, the NSF, and the State of California, SIO implemented the first stages of such a network, called HiSeasNet. In early 2002 we installed a satellite terminal on the R/V Roger Revelle, and leased service from a commercial teleport to provide a 64 kbps full-period connectivity between the ship and the public Internet. In 2003, ONR funded the installation of a 7m Teleport or hub antenna at SDSC, with coverage over much of the Pacific Ocean as well as ships systems for a second SIO ship, the R/V Melville, and the R/V Thomas Thompson operated by the University of Washington. This grant will expand the fleet served by HiSeasNet and area covered by the service.