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The only reason HFT players want these shortwave transmitters is that the other players are getting them too, and they have to compete. Once everybody has short

The only reason HFT players want these shortwave transmitters is that the other players are getting them too, and they have to compete. Once everybody has shortwave transmitters, they will no longer have any benefit, they will just become a new mandatory entry cost. That's an enormous waste of resources (both human capital and spectrum). Why not just make trading using radio below 30MHz illegal? It completely solves the problem with no tangible downside. If nobody else can do it, nobody has any reason to start doing it. Enforcement would be trivial.

sidewndr46 3y ago
What the heck would it matter? They'd just start asking for 30.1 MHz allocations from the FCC.
- jcalvinowens 3y ago
  If they could make skywave propagation work consistently between two fixed locations at >30MHz, I would be very surprised. The lower bands are the ones that work well (particularly 3-14MHz at this point in the solar cycle). Yes, you can get sporadic skywave as high as 50MHz sometimes... but it's really random and unreliable. They call it the "magic band" for a reason.
  - nullc 3y ago
    Ehh.. How much power are you imagining? Scatter propagation at 50 MHz is more consistent than sporadic-E just very weak (and calls for some particular modulation techniques due to path characteristics). And through much of the year you do get a window of sporadic-E pretty much every day.
    - jcalvinowens 3y ago
      Assuming the path is NYC-London or Chicago-London... it's just too far north to work in winter. Even at night in the summer, I'd bet against it. To some extent we can debate what "consistently" means... if like these guys, you have ~10KW of power with beam antennas the size of trucks on both ends, you can probably approach the reliability of a submarine cable (albeit at incomprehensibly narrower bandwidth). Low VHF propagation will have significant periods of unavailability in comparison, no matter how much power you use.

sidewndr46 3y ago

What the heck would it matter? They'd just start asking for 30.1 MHz allocations from the FCC.

jcalvinowens 3y ago
If they could make skywave propagation work consistently between two fixed locations at >30MHz, I would be very surprised. The lower bands are the ones that work well (particularly 3-14MHz at this point in the solar cycle). Yes, you can get sporadic skywave as high as 50MHz sometimes... but it's really random and unreliable. They call it the "magic band" for a reason.
- nullc 3y ago
  Ehh.. How much power are you imagining? Scatter propagation at 50 MHz is more consistent than sporadic-E just very weak (and calls for some particular modulation techniques due to path characteristics). And through much of the year you do get a window of sporadic-E pretty much every day.
  - jcalvinowens 3y ago
    Assuming the path is NYC-London or Chicago-London... it's just too far north to work in winter. Even at night in the summer, I'd bet against it. To some extent we can debate what "consistently" means... if like these guys, you have ~10KW of power with beam antennas the size of trucks on both ends, you can probably approach the reliability of a submarine cable (albeit at incomprehensibly narrower bandwidth). Low VHF propagation will have significant periods of unavailability in comparison, no matter how much power you use.