Computing skills test on briny sea

By Robert Carver

When thinking about computer science, the last thing that comes to mind is a tiny boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but the spray of salt water and the rush of tropical winds are about to earn two Concordia students some credits.

Branislav Radojcic, a fourth-year computer science student, departs May 27 for South Africa, where he and four other men will pilot a 48-foot catamaran northwest in a bid to cross the Atlantic and reach the island of Grenada. His classmate, Miroslav Damjanoski, will stay in Montreal, awash in work maintaining a database designed to automatically track the boat.

Besides being a rookie sailor on a small boat in a big ocean, Radojcic will be responsible for maintaining a laptop and the specialized radio system it will use to send and receive information.

Their goal is to not only track the course the boat takes, but to retrospectively calculate the best possible course, taking into account the curvature of the earth and the weather.

The boat sets sail May 31 and will make stops in St. Helena and Brazil before arriving at Grenada 33 to 45 days later, depending on weather and currents. The men have set up a program that will show, in real time, the position of the boat on a map. They have programmed a system to crunch the numbers after the trip is complete.

The project is anchored in technology. While it is easy for a crew to receive coordinates from a global positioning system (GPS), it is much more difficult to transmit those coordinates and other data. To do this, the boat’s computer will receive its coordinates from a GPS, then automatically send e-mail over a high frequency radio band known as SSB.

Those signals will be picked up by an existing worldwide network known as Winlink, which provides radio data service. From there, the message travels over the Internet to Damjanoski’s server in Montreal, which interprets the e-mail, pulls out the necessary information, updates the mapping program and stores the information in the database.

There is also a program on the server to retrieve and store weather data so the men can make their final calculations when Radojcic sheds his sea legs and returns home. Due to security concerns the pair were not permitted to piggyback their system on Concordia’s, and had to set up their own server.

Damjanoski predicts that if there’s a problem, it will be at this end of the operation. “It’s not going to be very stable. We’re going to have a backup, of course.” If the system is unable to receive or interpret e-mail and weather information, it won’t have data to use for the calculations.

For their efforts, each will earn six credits in project courses. They must do a full analysis of the project and submit a technical report. Their supervisor, Peter Grogono, suggested that by the time it is complete the men will have put in at least 500 hours.