Channels distinguished by vorticity experience crosstalk in the presence of plane scatterers like buildings, the ground, the sky… It seems pretty well restricted to what they used—a parabolic mirror, aiming it along a direct line of sight to the receiver.
This could potentially be very useful for communications in space, where we can’t spatially resolve a large number of faraway receivers. You can address by vorticity instead of frequency, and each receiver gets a full spectrum of bandwidth.
I could be off on this, but in short, it looks legit, if specialized.
~~ edited to add ~~
This doesn’t technically increase the number of channels available. What it does make possible is distinguishing these channels without having to have lots of antennas cooperating on sending every signal. One antenna, one channel.
Channels distinguished by vorticity experience crosstalk in the presence of plane scatterers like buildings, the ground, the sky… It seems pretty well restricted to what they used—a parabolic mirror, aiming it along a direct line of sight to the receiver.
This could potentially be very useful for communications in space, where we can’t spatially resolve a large number of faraway receivers. You can address by vorticity instead of frequency, and each receiver gets a full spectrum of bandwidth.
I could be off on this, but in short, it looks legit, if specialized.
~~ edited to add ~~
This doesn’t technically increase the number of channels available. What it does make possible is distinguishing these channels without having to have lots of antennas cooperating on sending every signal. One antenna, one channel.