Hacker News Reader

Rain has negligible affect on EM propagation in the frequencies we are operating in.

See: http://gsp.humboldt.edu/OLM/Courses/GSP_216_Online/lesson2-1...

I hope you have a better source for your claim than that! That page only says that water won't absorb the radiation. Even if water is transparent in those bands, you still have to deal with its refractive index, which can mean reflection and scattering. Have you tested this?

And, do you know for certain that it won't interfere with your laser safety system?

I'm far from an expert in this field but rain scatter is definitely a thing on all GHz bands. It's more of a problem (or a way of propagation depending on how you see it) with 5GHz and up. Climate and the size of the droplets also matter as the wavelength changes.

Presumably there would be forward scatter and back scatter to deal with I don't see how you could avoid that.

Furthermore, comments about beamforming and that it uses a phased array isn't surprising with regards to the application but you will still have sidelobes, even with a very tight beamwidth / high gain.

And then you have path loss etc, I have no idea how this would actually work - it sounds unfeasible on many fronts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com