[MLB-WIRELESS] hops over water - reflective properties of water for microwaves...

[John Dalton]

I know some HAMs experiment with communications
by bouncing lasers off clouds!  The other possibility
is meteor trails.  It is possible to bounce radio
waves off the plasma left by a meteor burning up.
Communication is in bursts, but there are enough
meteors out there to give useful average data rates.
Going into pie in the sky mode, it would be an
interesting project to build a global 'community
wireless' network using meteor trails in place
of satellites.  (Though it might turn out to just
be HF radio reinvented??)

Regards
John

(I've forwarded thsi to MW since some on the list might
find this interesting.)


On Mon, 02 Jun 2003 13:57:18 paul van den bergen wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Jun 2003 01:58 pm, John Dalton wrote:
> > Reflection is not necessarily a good thing for 802.11
> > WLANs!  The negative in the reflection coefficient
> > implies a phase inversion.  This means that close to the
> > surface the reflected signal and direct signal have nearly
> > equal path lengths. The sum of the two signals, with
> > approximately equal amplitudes but opposite phase, will
> > be close to zero.  Not a good thing!
> >
> > John
> 
> yes indeed.
> 
> my thinking was more on the lines of the moon-bounce thing, and largely 
> academic, not practicle - so I don't intnd to rely on it anytime soon :-)
> 
> I am also wondering what would happen if one were to point it at a cloud... 
> could one get a polarised microwave equivalent of arainbow - on second 
> thoughts, I'll not think about that, I'll go and do some work instead... :-)
> 
> -- 
> Dr Paul van den Bergen
> Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures
> caia.swin.edu.au
> pvandenbergen at swin.edu.au
> IM:bulwynkl2002
> "And some run up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stones 
> to pieces wi' hammers, like so many road makers run daft. 
> They say it is to see how the world was made."
> Sir Walter Scott, St. Ronan's Well 1824 
> 

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