I'm certainly not an expert of electricity nor radio nor microwave emitters, and such...And, the approach here sounds really amazing...But would a heavy enough downpour of rain act as a strong enough obstruction to trigger the lasers? In essence would weather - at least precipitation - have a negative impact here?
Using 2.4GHz-5.5GHz means minimal (if any) weather related interference. Rain wont have any effect...unless its heavy enough to bring down the antennas. but thats going to be an issue for any outdoors structure such as pylons or communication towers.
If you are using 2.4 GHz, how are you remaining in the near field yet extending the distances out to many km?
At 2.4GHz, λ is approximately 0.125m. Since the wavelength is small, the antenna is likely to be "electromagnetically long", i.e. the size of the antenna is of comparable size to the wavelength.
The edge of the near field in this case is defined by the Fraunhofer Distance [0][1]. Let's assume we want the edge of the near field to be 1km away. Running that through the Fraunhofer distance equation to compute the largest dimension of the radiator, we get ~7.9m. That's huge. For 10km it is 25m.
> ...system uses a net of lasers surrounding the beam to detect obstructions, like a bird or person, and it automatically shuts off transmission until the obstruction has moved on...
I guess i assumed any obstruction would suffice in triggering the lasers...but now re-reading it, maybe the obstruction has to be more significant.
good question. also, would it be affected by other elemental forces such as strong wind, snow (rural NZ!), earthquakes, temperature, the gamut of the sun's output, etc.
would also like to know if/how it will affect mobile phone towers
