Ungrounded Lightning's Journal: Total bandwidth with MIMO and "smart antennas"

A thread in the Slashdot article The 700MHz Question drifted into a discussion between me and rcw-home/rcw-work on using multiple antennas to synthesyze multiple patterns. This allows a particular hunk of bandwidth to be reused to generate several full-bandwidth links simultaneously - either between a base station and several remote stations or even between the base station and a single remote station that itself has multiple antennas.

The thread is beginning to horzon out on my user info history. So this journal entry is a new venue for its continuation after rcw-*'s most recent post.

I'll respond to that after he posts here to indicate that he's also making the move.

Putting it all in one place

[unitron]

Perhaps you should consider copying all of the posts to which you refer and pasting them here so that others can start at the beginning of the conversation and read through to the eventual end in one place (here) instead of two.

Re:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Perhaps you should consider copying all of the posts to which you refer and pasting them here so that others can start at the beginning of the conversation and read through to the eventual end in one place (here) instead of two.

Unfortunately I have a day job - that lasts into the night - plus a bunch of stuff to do at home. Perhaps you, or another poster, could do that for me? B-)

You can find them - either to read or to copy - by following the link in the journal article and then hitting "parent" a few ti

Re: Total bandwidth with MIMO and "smart antennas"

[rcw-home]

I'm here.

Interesting topic

[Omnifarious]

I have long been interested in this. The treatment of spectrum as real-estate has always seemed faintly off to me, and learning about this kind of thing told me that it was way more than faintly off.

You think of radio stations as giant flashing beacons (which is basically what they are). The 'radio' light happens to be light that goes through a whole bunch of stuff that would block visible light, so it can be seen even when the light generator (radio tower) isn't visible.

In this view a receiver is like

Re:

[rcw-home]

And like you can have a sign with a bunch of lights on it, you can also have the receiver be able to distinguish between a bunch of closely spaced lights and send multiple signals using the same color from the transmitter to the receiver.

This works great up to a point. Like, say I'm designing a flashing LED taillight for a bicycle and want it to be able to get people's attention. If I have the LEDs flash one after the other in sequence (so that exactly one is on at all times), it'll look cool up close but