Silver birch and satellites 

What it takes to stretch the information superhighway deep into a northern wilderness 

One of the beauties of an interactive canoe expedition is that it brings together some of the world's oldest transportation technolgy with some of today's newest communications equipment. 

The canoe's balance of form and function, honed over millenia, makes it an unbeatable way to experience Canada's remote wilderness. By contrast, sending stories and photos to an office in the big city while still travelling the country's farflung backwaters requires the latest in high tech, portable electronics.

The technology involved in communicating with civilization on a canoe trip has greatly improved over the last few years, becoming smaller, more effective and requiring less energy than ever before.

The key to our project is a Mitsubishi Omniquest satellite phone obtained through a Canadian provider (Glentel) out of Burnaby British Columbia. This unit, which is about the size of a laptop computer, allows us to connect our computer to the internet so that we can transmit stories and photos. 

All that's required is to orient the flip-up lid, which is the unit's antenna, in the direction of a geostationary satellite orbiting above us and punch in a few numbers on the keypad. Within seconds we can send data to anywhere in the world or dial up any phone number we'd like -- in theory.

Not only will we be able to send our trip reports along the way, but we'll also be able to give the grandmas an occasional call to keep them from worrying too much. 

A digital camera from Kodak will be used to shoot pictures and transfer them to the computer where they'll be stored until it's time to select the appropriate shots to send to CANOE. The camera that we're using is a very compact DC280 unit that comes with a zoom lens, USB interface to the computer and provides very good quality images. The unit runs on 4 AA batteries, either rechargeable or Alkaline. The camera has superb controls and is very intuitive to operate.

Writing stories and editing photos will happen on a Macintosh G3 PowerBook computer. This 500 megahertz unit is not only very fast and easy to use, it's also very frugal in energy consumption. The ability to do things quickly without using a lot of battery power is critical in this remote location where the nearest electrical outlet is many hundreds of kilometers away.

The PowerBook is a lightweight unit with a very sleek profile, two important considerations when your gear is being flown in and then carried along in a canoe. 

The delicate electronic equipment will be kept in a watertight, hard-shelled carrying case. This will protect it from moisture and dust. 

Providing power to this equipment is the most intriguing challenge. We'll begin the trip with fully charged batteries, but they won't last long. To keep all the equipment running, we're bringing along four 12-volt "gel" batteries. 

Also included in our kit will be an inverter which takes the 12-volt DC source and converts it to 110-volts AC - the same type of current found in households. Some of our equipment will run on 12 volts and the rest will run on the converter. To keep the 12-volt batteries charged, we'll be using several solar panels. Because we're travelling at the 60th parallel, there'll be lots of sunshine with almost 20 hours between sun-up and sun-down. 

We practiced hooking up and using the equipment in our backyard to make sure everything worked as anticipated. The unit on the right is the satellite phone while Brendan sits at the keyboard of the Macintosh computer we used for capturing images and writing stories.