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May 07, 2005

SkyFinder to the rescue

In addition to all of the work I've been doing getting the new SkyWay service launched, I've been working on a few other side projects that will ultimately make life easier for me. The one I'm the most proud of at the moment is something I call SkyFinder.

http://skyfinder.skywayusa.net

Here's the jist of it:

A customer purchases the SkyWay system. They know their zipcode and we give them the name of the satellite that they're going to be directing their dish to. So what then?

Well, in order to get any dish aimed, you need to know the azimuth and elevation for your location so you can point the dish to the proper satellite.

EDUCATION INSERT: The azimuth is the left to right alignment of the dish, and the elevation is the up and down alignment.

SkyWay purchased a list of zip codes and the latitude/longitude of the zip codes, which I then placed into a SQL database. That allows me to get the proper latitude and longitude where a customer lives. They don't need to know all the difficult stuff ... just their zip code.

We also need to know the longitude of the bird that we're aiming the customer's dish to. This part is simple though. Every satellite in orbit has a unique longitude assigned to it. A simple Google search of the name of the bird and you can find the longitude. To make it easy on our customers, I just assigned the longitude to the name of the bird and populated a drop down menu.

Now, based on a series of geometry equations (which I had to remember how to use sin, cos, and tan from high school, bleh), I was able to get the proper azimuth and elevation for our customers. To make the tool even more sweet, I even added a height calculator so that customers can determine how far away from the base of any object their dish needs to be in order to clear that object.

Say, as an example, that I have a tree that is in my back yard. That tree happens to be in the way of me getting a good lock on the bird I'm aiming at. Based on some educated guesses, I have a good guess that the tree is roughly 150 feet tall. I plug that height into the SkyFinder, and in addition to the azimuth and elevation, it will also tell me how far out need to put the dish from that tree.

For those that do better with graphical examples, I even put together a "this is a tree, this is a person, stand the person on their head to get the height of the tree" kinda charts. Needless to say, I think that at this point you can't possibly get any more dummy proof than what I've made it. If someone doesn't understand, then they need to have a professional come out and do the installation and be done with it. :)

~out...

Posted by ed at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)