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Comment by NiceWayToDoIT | Hacker News Reader

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NiceWayToDoIT·

Nice.

I have few technical questions if you do not mind:

How strong are those lasers how many watts?

What is wave length and what is optical spread over distance?

Lastly, how does system handle flock of birds or any other optical barrier?

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Rain and fog are the traditional enemies, difficult to defeat with redundancy. I suspect the answer is that downtime does happen but customers value the price/performance more than they dislike the downtime. The steepness of the tradeoff also probably depends on local climate, but that's a blessing as well as a curse: initial deployments can preferentially happen in advantageous locations.

Could not have said it better myself. One more thing, keeping the units within 2-3km pretty much negate the rain/fog issues.

40W typical usage. Wavelength 1535nm - 1565. Birds haven't been much of an issue in our testing over the last 12 months.

So, 1500nm is infrared range and 40W quite serious output I guess at the close range can be a quite dangerous...

For instance this is 500mW laser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuceDT2R4f4

It's a class 1M laser and a 100% eye safe. We've had it thoroughly tested and certified.

A laser cutter is not at all the same as a laser transmitter. The beam focus, wavelength, emission pulse, etc. are all different to the point where comparing power outputs is not a good idea.

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