picture: PocketTRANS screenshots

PocketTRANS guides you step by step through the upload, simplifying this sometimes highly technical process down to a few simple button clicks. Profiles can be generated and assigned to certain upload targets, so that you don't have to decide every time about which dialup connection, audio compression or encryption key will be used. Icons help to navigate faster through all possible choices. PocketTRANS is designed to fully automate the transfer process.

You don't have to be a technical expert to upload wirelessly, via modem or even via satellite!

PocketTRANS provides state of the art audio codecs to reduce the bandwidth needed for the content transfer. Beside the uncompressed linear upload - that should not be used in the field when only low bandwidth mobile data connections are available - there is one compression codec profile for voice & music recording and one for voice only.

While MPEG-1 layer II ("MP2") and layer II ("MP3") have been defined already more than 7 years ago, coding and compression technology has made great steps forward within those last years. Therefore, PocketTRANS provides much more advanced, proprietary codecs, enhanced for the needs of professional journalist recordings.

E.g.: A typical mobile phone data connection via GPRS can provides an average upload bandwidth of about 8-24kbit/s. When used to upload a 96kbit MP3 file, this would result a transfer time multiplier in between 4 and 12, and this only in case of a steadily good connection without any variances and excluding the actual compression time. In reality, it turns out that an upload factor around 10 is realistic, i.e. it takes 10 minutes to upload one minute of MP3 audio via GPRS. These results not only mean long transfer times and costs, but also let the journalist miss the primary target of a handheld solution: "Be the fastest! Be first on air!"

With the PocketTRANS codecs, the same audio quality in compression can be gained with less than half the bandwidth, i.e. upload time. A 48kBit upload with PocketREC has the same or better quality than a 96kBit MP3 upload. At the same time, the audio compression is handled "on the fly", i.e. these parts of the file that are already compressed are being transferred immediately. Therefore, there is no need to wait for the compression to be finished before the transfer will start - the transfer does start right away! "Be the fastest! Be first on air!"

Together with the "optimized protocol for wireless low bandwidth connections" (see below), PocketTRANS enables an upload factor in between 2 and 3: 1 minute audio recording just takes 2-3 minutes to be sent to the station - directly from the field via a standard mobile phone data connection - in broadcast audio quality! The typical "15 second cut" can be completely delivered in less than a minute.

PocketPC configured e-mail accounts. The user can individually decide for each upload, which protocol, upload target, etc. will be used.

PocketTRANS offers beside ftp and e-mail a third, proprietary upload protocol that is optimized for low bandwidth connections and satellite data connections. With this protocol, the typical throughput e.g. over a SAT or GPRS data connection can be doubled, if compared to a standard ftp upload.

With this optimized protocol, the upload speed compared to ftp can be up to doubled!

External peripheral devices, internal or external modem connections etc. that may be required for the upload are being controlled fully automatically. You don't have to manually dial a connection or restore it in case it dropped due to a bad signal reception: PocketTRANS does this automatically for you!

In case that you have started an upload right after your interview has finished, jump to the car and drive through a tunnel, you don't have to worry if the upload was interrupted. PocketTRANS automatically retries, recovers and resumes the data upload once the signal is back!

PocketTRANS provides strong encryption for protecting the privacy and increasing the security of journalists, i.e. if deployed abroad. There is no need for external Crypto boxes or dongles, as PocketTRANS does encrypt the uploaded data stream. Custom keys can be defined, and the encryption algorithms can be selected individually. Especially if you are reporting from non democratic countries, this feature is a valuable asset to protect yourself from any 3rd party or governmental interest which controls the communication infrastructure. For the broadcast station, this feature can be used as a signature to sign and identify the uploaded material, i.e. prevent altering of the uploaded audio content by 3rd party.

PocketTRANS allows a very detailed configuration of preset profiles belonging to all parts of the upload process. This includes physical and logical parameters of the data connection, audio compression preferences, data encryption settings, etc. Presets can be assigned to an icon that allows a quick and reliable navigation during the upload. For more details about the preset profiles, please see below in the section PocketCONFIG.

(*) IMPORTANT: The use of the PocketTRANS audio compression codecs, encryption and/or the bandwidth optimized upload protocol requires a PocketREC Rich Media Router as interface into existing Content Management or Radio Automation Systems.