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Comment by cwhiz | Hacker News Reader

Really? Do you think the NZ government is incompetent, Emrod is a scam, and/or PowerCo have not considered these extremely basic issues? The error by OP is assuming everyone involved in this project are morons who have yet to consider even a cursory search of the feasibility of their proposals.

This is such a typical internet armchair thing to do. Point out some Google-able “flaw” and wonder aloud whether the team of scientists and engineers have considered it.

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You're making a few of your own assumptions here. I'm op in this thread and yes, I do think this is going to fail because of the physics of it. The free space path loss is always going to lose most of the power (ie, 40-50 dB off the top, and it's the top that matters) for any reasonable dish sizes, freq choice, and distance over 1km.

Why do you think that, though? If the beam is shaped so that it's almost all captured, and there are negligible atmospheric losses due to the frequency range chosen, why should there be high path losses?

The laws of physics say that it's impossible to generate such a tightly focused beam with manageable antenna sizes.

(with or without Near Field considerations)

Why do you think that Radio Astronomy dishes are so humongous?

No magic at play here. The equations are open for all to explore. We are not breaking the laws of physics. Just flexing them with clever engineering.. just like innovators that came before us. For example, the radiating near field of a 2.4GHz antenna about 8 meters long would extend about 1km.

Surely you do not expect Emrod to discuss in detail the subject matter of its patent applications?

The physicists, scientists, engineers, governments, corporations, and investors all seem to disagree.

But some guy on the internet says it won’t work.

Someone elsewhere in this thread pointed out who the founder (Zvi Kushnir or Greg Kushnir) is, and some of his past.. "endeavours". He's started a new company every year for the past 5 years; including crypto and "psychic consulting" which he is no longer the director of. Luckily New Zealand Companies is open and searchable.

I believe this was an ad buy bought by marketing at PowerCo rather than some "R&D" department (hint: they don't have those at NZ power companies). It likely didn't get more than a layman's eye.

Have a meeting with a few stakeholders there next week, will ask about it. Also reaching out to Callaghan Institute who funded this.

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