29 December 2022

Ground Control has developed a new satellite IoT gateway and trialled it in Central Africa as part of an exercise to combat poaching of endangered and monitored wildlife.

Ground Control worked with Digital Forest UK to deploy its new IoT gateway in Gabon, Central Africa. The gateway should enable more efficient transmission of ‘even larger data payloads from very remote locations’ to deliver a ‘lower cost message-based transfer.’

In the trial, the satellite IoT gateway enabled Digital Forest to integrate two-way messaging into its systems via RockREMOTE, which transfers 100kb of data per message. They were then able to transmit satellite images in real-time to rangers tasked with catching illegal poachers, whereas prior to this its image capture methods only allowed them to analyse data retrospectively.

“The new satellite IoT gateway answers many of the questions that have been posed for a number of years now, namely, to capture and transmit larger payloads of data without the traditionally associated cost burdens,” said Alastair MacLeod, CEO of Ground Control. “This is primarily because RockREMOTE works to package and compress messages prior to transmission, to minimize the amount of data sent. Additionally, as the data is transmitted on demand, it uses less power and is ideal for mission critical data analysis from extreme and remote locations.”