Zappelin to replace communication tower

[Zefram]

zeppelin will replace all of the terrestrial mobile phone antennas in Switzerland - if a Swiss inventor has his way.
Should Kamal Alavi's project for the high-tech airship take wing, the worlds of mobile telephony and data transmission would be turned on their heads.
Not only would the technology, called High Altitude Platform Systems (Haps), make the current 1,000 earth-bound antennas redundant, it would drastically reduce radiation.
A Swiss of Iranian extraction, Alavi is a former aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur who heads his own firm, Stratxx. Together with a team of 50 scientists, he is preparing a 2007 test run of the airship, which he has named the "X station".

LINKES (http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/feature/detail/Mobile_phone_airship_to_conquer_stratosphere.html? siteSect=108&sid=6873540&cKey=1152528169000)

Sweet............ later we could see these flying behemoth surrounding planet earth!

[mr. dalek]

omg once this is released there will be thousands no no billions of crappy 3rd rate movies featuring them ......

that willl be cool when are they gonna do it in the usa?

[PCgeek]

"Not only would the technology, called High Altitude Platform Systems (Haps), make the current 1,000 earth-bound antennas redundant, it would drastically reduce radiation."

Well they're using one of these things to replace 1000 antennas. I'm sure we have a lot more of em here.

[omga14]

figure that if one could replace 1000 antennas with current available tech, we could see future Blimps(yes that's what they are) replacing up to 10 times that amount in the very near future. that means that 100 of these blimps would replace....carry the one, wait there is no one.........1million antennas. when you figure that we have about 60k airborne objects in the atmosphere currently and none in High Altitude(at least none the governments talking about) it's a pretty good idea.

btw, this idea is nothing new as scientists have been looking at this for a few years now to replace orbiting sattelites for cost savings in application and maintenance. you won't have to launch a space shuttle or rocket to get them in place and it would be much easier to get to them for maintenance purposes.