SPAWAR is the Navy's premiere lab for communication. So we worry about signals and how information
gets from one place to the next for the entire Navy.
My name is Randall Olsen and I invented the DANTE antenna technology.
DANTE is actually an acronym. It stands for Directional Ad-hoc Networking Technology.
Most wireless technology sends radio waves in all directions. Our antenna technology
sends it in only a very narrow direction. This type of technology has been around for
many, many years but it has been very expensive. In satellites the cost is about 10 million
dollars for one of these antennas. So what we've done is invent a way to make these antennas
much, much cheaper. Maybe $1,000. Maybe $10,000. Outside, each cart has a number of our special
DANTE antennas on it, and what we're simulating there is a ship which would have several of
these antennas strapped to the railings of the ship.
Here we are on the Cape St. George. It's a cruiser. And the point of the DANTE technology
is for a ship such as this to be able to communicate with another ship that's perhaps twenty miles
away with a very high data rate.
The DANTE technology includes an antenna which we hang over the rails of the ship, and they
point in all four different directions. And if you look over to the ship that's pier side
in the distance, we would connect our signal to that ship over in the distance. But if
we weren't pier side that ship could be twenty miles away for our communications.
We're in what's called the CIC. That's the location, the brains of the ship. The testing
that we did in the grass, those carts represented ships, so now we're on a real ship. The technology
that we develop enables the information flow inside the CIC to happen as far as connecting
to other ships.
One of the challenges as a technologist is that you work really hard on a project, and
often times you get a great technical result but you don't get to see it go and do anybody
any good. And that's very frustrating for scientists. Being on the bridge here gives
us a feeling that we're actually helping out the war fighter and seeing applications that
have an affect on somebody. And so for my whole team, this is a really fulfilling sort
of thing to see our work actually making a difference.