Hacker News Reader

It's possible for starlink to beat radio, because radio can't always go straight to the target. If I wanted a radio link from NY->Tokyo, what would that path look like?

View on HN

It would look like the HF radio bouncing off the ionosphere. I have contacted someone in Japan from Oregon. The downside of HF is that the bandwidth is low with 30MHz across the entire band.

There was company recently wanting to do high-frequency trading on HF because of the quickest path.

I'm curious how much the curved route affects the effective speed of communication with skywaves. You also have many situations where communication becomes impossible due to space weather or other atmospheric phenomena.

True, it would be bouncing around between ground and the atmosphere (when it works at all).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com