3 ms·

Hence towers with dishes on the outside. Long perplexed why they had canvas stretched across, and didn't point up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#/me

• jjjjmoney 3y ago
  Our Charter Spectrum “cable” connection goes over a microwave link like this. How do I know? Well, we had a pretty big wildfire a couple years ago that burned a microwave tower a couple hours away. The official response was that they couldn’t get internet back in town until they rebuilt the tower. Our internet was down for a couple weeks until it was safe enough for them to get back to the tower site.
• Sharlin 3y ago
  Microwave relay links predate spaceflight and even when comms satellites became a thing, it made (and still makes) little sense to beam regional TV/radio/phone up to geosynchronous and back, due to cost and latency. There was no good replacement to terrestrial microwave until fiber optic became a thing. In a very real sense microwave relays are the direct descendant of the optical telegraph (aka "clacks" in Discworld lingo).
• ac29 3y ago
  > Long perplexed why they had canvas stretched across Its a radome, used to protect the antenna from weather.