One-Man Reporting Band

Videophone style broadcast news is a departure from conventional methods. Traditionally, when one wants to conduct a live remote, the station needs to reserve a satellite truck and a specific time to transmit. That takes time. The network also must have a satellite in place to receive the call. That takes money. Besides setup and cost, you have to get the equipment when and where you need it. Not easy to do in extremely remote field operations. Videoconferencing through an Inmarsat satellite phone is dial on demand. It’s simply a point-to-point data connection over an ISDN line that requires no preparation or reservation. It’s portable, and can get images on the air fast. And because of that, news networks are using satellite videoconferencing as their first line of defense. Acting like the journalistic equivalent of Navy Seals, videophone reporters are the first to arrive at a scene and broadcast.

Will the Real Satellite Man Please Stand Up?

Not nearly as funny as Al Franken, yet embodying the satellite man character’s ideal is Jim Bruton. He’s used satellite phones to transmit video for the past seven years.

An Emmy award-winning producer for National Geographic, Bruton’s extreme producing skills require himself and his equipment to be able to survive severe conditions: Antarctica, Namibia and most notably, five transmissions from the summit of Mt. Everest.

Jim Bruton

He’s also traveled across all the networks, conducting broadcast satellite videoconferencing for CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS. A freelancer for years, Bruton accepted an offer this June from NBC. In just the few months he’s been there, Bruton broke the elusive 128 kbps barrier for videoconferencing over Inmarsat phones.

Videoconferencing via Inmarsat-Behind the Scenes

Satellite quality, distance traveled, and timing of data streams are all issues that complicate the delivery of video. For the person who sets up a videoconference in the comfort of his or her office, improving video usually means increasing bandwidth. But when you use Inmarsat, the satellite phone network, you’re locked into increments of 64 kbps. Videoconferencing standard H.320 is a point-to-point solution that works on demand and will accept two Inmarsat 64 kbps channels to create one ISDN level stream. H.320 is designed for voice and video over ISDN. It’s also easy to deploy worldwide. Unlike its IP-to-IP counterpart, H.323, there’s no packet overhead and the delays that do exist are fixed. These known delays are a standard part of the ISDN videoconferencing solution.

ISDN consists of two B channels and one D channel. The D channel makes the handshake, holding information like the timing of the delays. Data is sent out over the two B channels, with video and audio being split and mixed among both channels. Using the time stamp information in the D channel, H.320 decodes the data when the two channels arrive at the source. The data must be sent in real time, and to pull off a good videoconference there has to be at most a 500-millisecond delay. If the delay goes over a second, then the two connected parties begin talking over each other.

To pull off the video, the streams must bond. 7E sells a device called the S0DA that will bond two Inmarsat calls for the TH-1. 7E’s latest model, the TH-2 requires no S0DA box and will bond two 64 kbps streams internally. Bruton has his own homemade device that bonds four separate streams. By controlling the sequence of the streams, Bruton claims to have successfully bonded four 64 kbps streams to pull off a 256 kbps videoconference call via Inmarsat.