The Statewide Committee for Research honors 's Northern Innovators

Alex Hills

The Wireless Pioneer Northern Innovators Hall of Fame Member

When he was shoving an antenna mast into , is a lonely mesa rising from “The big challenge of Wireless Andrew was a 40-mile-per-hour wind on an April day in a frozen plain of sea ice. Built on the only how to get the radio coverage right,” Hills the early 1970s, 30-year-old Alex Hills did not ground available, the village perches on a says. “The things I learned in Bush Alaska anticipate that the lessons he was learning on steep hillside. Its residents face west, toward about the odd behavior of radio waves were Little Diomede would someday help people ’s Big Diomede, a rock about 10 times the key.” talk with each other using computers that fit the size of Little Diomede. in their pockets. With memories of village triumphs over a That locale was a challenge for Hills and great variety of radio-wave gremlins, Hills Hills, now 70, is a Palmer resident who learned his technician partner, who battled the and his team created a pioneer wireless the complexities of ham radio signals as a vagaries of radio signals to get village voice system. Professors were able to log on and boy in a New Jersey attic and honed his skills communications systems to work even when stroll with their computers. The network grew while installing communications systems a mountain did not stand in the way. until it covered the 140 acres of Carnegie- throughout Bush Alaska. He lived in Nome, Mellon campus. If professors wandered Kotzebue and Bethel, flying to satellite “We couldn’t install the antenna in a place off-campus, the network shifted them to villages of the big hubs as he helped improve with a clear view to the east, but we did the Pittsburgh’s mobile phone network without the limited communications systems of the next best thing,” Hills wrote in his book, Wi- them knowing it. 1970s. Fi and the Bad Boys of Radio. “We aimed the antenna directly at the cliffs of Russia’s Big Hills at first limited the network to the royalty Tall as a point guard, the professorial Hills Diomede, where signals could be reflected of the university system, but the serfs found used his Alaska problem-solving skills to back to the Alaska mainland.” a way in. develop the first Wi-Fi network at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Hills did not In bouncing a signal off Russia, Hills used “We had a password to restrict access to invent Wi-Fi, but Wireless Andrew, the child one of the difficulties of radio systems — the professors, and the students always asked of his imagination, became an extensive reflection of signals that often garbles a me for it,” Hills says. “I always gave them a wireless network, one that techno geeks message — to solve a problem. great big ‘No!’ We worried that too many copied and improved upon. students would overload the network. Twenty years later, Hills withdrew the Alaska On , Hills was — with lessons banked in his brain when he faced “But, of course, our students were very the help of locals more practiced at sticking a pleasant dilemma: the development of a creative. They hacked their way on there. In to a metal roof in a big wind — installing a network of radio signals that would allow a few years there were more students than VHF radio system so villagers could have professors at Carnegie Mellon University in professors on it.” contact with mainlanders on the Seward Pittsburgh to access the Internet with no Peninsula and the rest of the world. The cables connected to their computers. Seeing students lounged on the campus mall very high frequency radios he was powering surfing the Internet with no wires attached, up replaced the village-staple shortwave With Wireless Andrew, (named after Hills saw a dream realized. And he knew that radios, the signals of which bounced off the university benefactors Carnegie and Mellon) Wireless Andrew was the start of something upper atmosphere. When a blazing aurora Hills and a team of engineers and students big. scrambled the ionosphere, it sometimes built a network that had to overcome all the disabled the short-wave systems. radio problems — reflection, shadowing, “When you want to see the future, look at refraction, scattering and diffraction — that what young people are doing,” Hills says. Little Diomede, the home of about 115 he confronted on every installation of radio “When they think something is really cool, people, is a unique place even among Alaska phones at Alaska villages. it’s probably going to go somewhere.” villages. The island, in the pinch-point of