Summer is emerging and people are heading for travel and adventure. A few people will jump into nature with only survival tools, but most of us still want our normal comforts, like staying connected away from the strong signals of home. Connection is so important that Airstream received the New Horizons award at RVX: The RV Experience in Salt Lake City, Utah. Airstream’s new trailers include their Airstream Connected technology. The Airstream technology uses a cellular router with a high performance antenna to provide Wi-Fi internet access both inside and outside the RV. While the Airstream Connected package is custom designed for their trailers, anyone who wants to be connected far away from home can get the same technology with a cellular router and a high quality antenna. With these tools RVers heading to the woods and sailors on the open water can stay connected even where smart phones struggle for a signal.

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More than 600 municipal law enforcement agencies have helicopters for aerial surveillance and observation, but few of them have real-time video feeds for responders on the ground. The Greenville County Sheriff’s Office was one of those agencies. Although Greenville is South Carolina’s most populous county, and the Greenville Sheriff’s department has over 400 deputies and 100 additional employees, they still couldn’t get real-time video from their Bell OH58C helicopter to their mobile command center and responders in the field. Industry standard COTS microwave systems are expensive, require multiple towers, and line-of-sight transmission. Using an off-the-shelf microwave transmission system was not only cost prohibitive, it was a massive undertaking. Adequate coverage of Greenville County with a microwave system would have required finding, leasing, or erecting towers to cover 800 square miles. The only field alternative was a $10,000 handheld receiver that still required line-of-sight connection to the Helicopter.

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