3 ms·

My guess is that they had an inversion layer, tropospheric duct, or other enhancement condition. 43km is a long way on 0.02 watts.

• bprater 5y ago
  As a reference, folks that fly quadcopters, drones and flying wings often will transmit at 1 to 2 watts of power using line of sight. (Yes, at the edge of legal.) .02 watts is an insignificant amount of power for radio transmission.
  • spookthesunset 5y ago
    It’s not edge if legal if you are a licensed ham operator. Then could fly with more than a thousand watts! Of course you’d have a little problem with the battery :-)
  • bananasbandanas 5y ago
    Given a good control link such as ExpressLRS [0], people can also fly quadcopters 10+ kilometers on as little as 10 mW. See for example the range competition at [1]. Of course, the VTX is usually a different matter.. [0]https://www.expresslrs.org https://www.expresslrs.org [1]https://www.expresslrs.org/2.0/info/long-range/ https://www.expresslrs.org/2.0/info/long-range/
  • bri3d 5y ago
    I think it's much more fair to compare EIRP to EIRP, I don't know the gain of this crazy foil dish but it's probably pretty high. FPV is way harder since you can't use a highly directional transmit antenna and you're weight and size constrained, so you usually have dinky <3dB transmit gain and have to make up for it with big radio amplifiers.
• ryanmarsh 5y ago
  From the diagram in the article the entire fresnel zone was unoccluded.