An environmental monitoring agency is establishing communication infrastructure for two polar operations:
Arctic Research Station Boreas: Located on a remote, uninhabited island in the Svalbard archipelago, this station must begin transmitting basic meteorological telemetry immediately. Over the next 333 years, the site will be expanded into a permanent, fully-staffed polar observatory requiring high-throughput, low-latency data links for real-time climate modeling.
Icebreaker Vessel Njord: A mobile scientific research vessel that will track sea-ice drift across multiple remote Arctic sectors during a temporary 999-month expedition.
Outline the physical principles of how both optical fibre cabling and satellite communication networks transmit data. [8][8][8]
Suggest and justify appropriate communication solutions for both: (i) Arctic Research Station Boreas (addressing both the immediate short-term and the long-term phases), (ii) Icebreaker Vessel Njord. [6][6][6]
22 exam-style questions on AQA A Level Physics Data communication systems (A-level only), covering Principles of communication systems (A-level only), Transmission media (A-level only), Time-division multiplexing (A-level only), and Amplitude (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) techniques (A-level only). Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.