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Some of you may be wondering our the technical arrangements and how the communication between Finland and Everest is going to be arranged. Here you have a brief introduction to this topic.

We will bring with us a number of equipment that requires electricity to operate, e.g. laptop computers from Lenovo, satellite phones (Thuraya), walkie talkies, cameras, MP3 players and mobile phones. The main source of electricity will be a solar panel and also batteries are considered for some equipment.

In practice we will have two identical sets of power system equipment. One for base camp and the other for advanced base camp. The set will include a solar panel that charges a battery through a separate charge controller. The battery ensures power supply day and night. The battery will be bought in Kathmandu and will be around 30-50Ah battery. The equipment will be connected to the battery also via the charge controller to avoid full discharge of the battery. For this we will build an adapter with 4-6 car charger connectors to enable charging of more than one equipment simultaneously. If there is a situation that we need to ?ration? the available power the priority order is as follows: 1) needed walkie talkies, 2) satellite phone, 3) needed cameras, 4) laptop, 5) any other equipment.

The communication between ABC and high camps is done by walkie talkies. E.g. from camp 3 the message goes to camp 2 or 1 and is then relayed to ABC and vice versa. We will use a specific times of a day when the radios are open in high camps. This allows us to save batteries up there. In ABC we are listening all the time to make sure that in case of any kind of emergency we can receive the information immediately.

The daily messages to Finland are sent by email from a laptop which is connected to the satellite phone via USB cable. The photographs are transferred to the laptop and modified to the size suitable to be attached in the emails. The data speed of the satellite phones is only 9.6kbps and therefore no big attachments are possible to be sent. The emails are sent to our webmaster in Finland who then puts them into the diary in our web page www.everest.fi. Also the expedition members can send personal messages to their relatives, these messages are forwarded by the webmaster to the right recipients.

You can send messages to the expedition to the address retkikunta@everest.fi. They will be filtered by the webmaster and then sent forward to the Everest. This filtering is needed due to the fact that there can't be large attachments in the emails since the data speed of the connection is rather low.