Comment by elmo2you | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elmo2you | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me, but this reads to me is as a big load of cleverly worded (misleading) statements that say little, yet make all kind of vague suggestions.

I don't know any details about this particular tech, but I think the article says this can detect radio waves over a relatively large spectrum (0Hz..20GHz) simultaneously. It doesn't mention anything about focusing on any particular frequency, or even if it can say anything about the frequency of a signal. From the article itself, it sounds more like this tech can just detect if ANY signal within this range is present, not particularly what kind of signal. Maybe the tech can "hone in" on a particular signal, but I don't remember reading anything about that.

All the rest, about all the marvelous new possibilities this tech will provide (once developed further) sounds more like somebody from marketing went all out on it. Just as so many things with "quantum" in their name, it sounds mostly like a nothing-burger blown completely out of proportion and context.

It's not an antenna like I thought at first. It's a tuner with 4 MHz instantaneous bandwidth and a very wide tuning range, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14383 - the actual (laser intensity) measurements are done within the RF electrical field above a coplanar waveguide track on a PCB.

It's a cool RF tuner. But it still need a real, full size, antenna. It's also not clear to me if they can get the phase informations out of the laser intensity measurements. I suppose it's all a matter of how fast they can sample the light.

So basically, 3x higher than an hackrf (1MHz-~6GHz)? Not bad, but also not something revolutionary.

Hackrf only captures 20 MHz of spectrum. But is tunable to the range you described. You would need 1000 hackrf to capture the entire range at once.

Bandwidth is 4MHz, according to the article.

I think the point is that they are improving the technique. In absolute terms the tuning range and bandwidth aren’t particularly notable compared with current technology. For example Lime Microsystems next generation RFIC under development is targeting a range of 100 GHz and 2 GHz of bandwidth.

https://limemicro.com/technology/

Did you read the paper?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.14383.pdf

This is a bit cynical, but a great rant and it makes some good points. I’m curious what’s your opinion on Bitcoin?

> I’m curious what’s your opinion on Bitcoin

a Ponzi scheme by any other name .. which primarily works because it exploits the uncertainties which many people feel about yet another system we are all invested in (whether we like it or not), sporting an extremely unfair distribution and being fundamentally broken too (in fact, at this point it pretty much functions like a Ponzi scheme too): The Dollar dominated world economy.

It is a Tulip mania in the making, which is going to make smart/early investors very rich (as long as they act quickly) when an sudden event (unexpected for most people) will trigger a serious crash of the world economy (which at this point appears almost inevitable). I'm pretty sure that plenty of serious investors are cynically gambling on exactly just that.

Sadly, an increasing proportion of primarily the US economy (and plenty of foreign ones, somehow dependent/reliant on it) revolves around stocked-up capital (potential power, but not used for anything useful, just speculation and political influence) on one hand and increasingly desperate fraud and deception, trying to access this piled up capital. The daily news is distracting most people away from this reality, but I think it is getting worse, rapidly. Something will crack, eventually.

Bitcoin isn't the real problem. It's mostly a symptom of a far bigger problem (will only be "solved" with a crash).

Similarly, plenty of technical/science news these days appears to be no more than deceptive marketing campaigns. But that is again, just like bitcoin, more like a symptom of an even bigger problem than the actual problem itself.

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