SOLARA MAKES COMMUNICATIONS FROM ANYWHERE EASY Submitted by Solara Data
Photos courtesy of Solara Data.
Solara designs and manufactures extremely durable, two-way cellular texting devices with GPS location capabilities, which, thanks to their reliance on the powerful Iridium satellite network, have no dead zones anywhere on earth. Solara is a company based in Winnipeg, Manitoba that started offering a personal tracking device in 2004, and since then has expanded its line to include satellite texting and GPS locations by satellite using a simple-touse smartphone app with the Flare product. Solara’s products are found literally across the globe, in almost every imaginable scenario, whether it be military vehicles in Europe, Coast Guard services in New Zealand, mine exploration in Australia or expeditions to the North Pole. “The beauty of it is, you could be anywhere on Earth and it will still work,” says Solara president Tom Tessier. With such a powerful product that has such a range of applications, Solara’s tracking devices were something Tessier was inspired to The Solara Flare is designed and manufactured in Winnipeg by Solara for Canadian conditions.
create after working with the Inuit in Nunavut. In the 1990s, Tessier was responsible for the data and radio systems for SpacePort Canada, which was based in Churchill, Manitoba. During the course of his work, Tessier developed working relationships and friendships with many of the Inuit people living in neighbouring Nunavut, particularly when it came to recovering SpacePort’s spent rocket stages from the field. Tessier was struck by the Inuit’s ability to live off the land and how they would often track caribou herds for hundreds of miles inland. However, conditions in Canada’s north can go from bad, to worse, to extreme very quickly: temperatures can plummet and blizzards can make visibility almost nil. Tessier said that individuals dying from exposure as a result of becoming lost, or people who were simply never seen again, was a regular occurrence for these communities – a tragic, yet unavoidable risk of living in that environment. It was from talking with the people of these communities that the idea behind Solara was born, said Tessier. “I had one Inuit fellow come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re the engineer from the South, come up with something that works, so we can track these people and know when they’re in trouble,’” Tessier says.
The Solara Flare is operated from the easy-to-use app in your smartphone for texting to and from anyone.
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MANITOBA MINING REVIEW 2021-2022
At that time, the 1990s, there were no reliable devices that could provide that level of communications – or any that could withstand
