I'd question whether anyone writing "the atmosphere is fairly transparent to microwaves" has calculated the link budget, then implemented in the real world an F

I'd question whether anyone writing "the atmosphere is fairly transparent to microwaves" has calculated the link budget, then implemented in the real world an FCC part 101 licensed microwave radio system (example: 1024QAM modulation, 11 GHz standard FDD band plan, +16 Tx power, 80 MHz channels H&V dual linear, 35 km, 180 cm high performance dishes both ends) and seen the path loss in reality. I think anyone that's done terrestrial point to point microwave telecom professionally will take a very skeptical view of things like 10 GHz band, 1 km power "beams". the reality is that the atmosphere absolutely eats microwave, and when it's not eating it, you have temperature inversions, ducting and diffraction effects to take into account at long distances as well. this is why their demo only works at 1.0 km.