DARPA will turn obsolete drones into flying Wi-Fi access points

We all suffer if the Internet is urgently needed, of any "quality", but it is not, neither wired nor wireless. Sometimes even in a large European city you have to look for an access point for a long time.

Well, for the military, the lack of communication can be like death, both literally and figuratively. And the DARPA agency plans to create a wireless network of several old drones.

These unmanned vehicles, RQ-7, were very actively used during the Iraq war. And now, most of these devices are not used in military warehouses. And military experts pondered the possibility of turning the drone into a flying access point, providing a fairly large region with an Internet channel with a bandwidth of 1 Gbit / s.

The drones of the above model are large enough to carry the necessary equipment. The military has developed special transceiver equipment operating in the millimeter-wave radio frequency spectrum. In addition, signal amplifiers have been developed that work with half the noise level, compared with "civilian" network equipment of a similar type.

The drone can stay in the air for nine hours without refueling. Of course, the question arises of the possible scale of such a network and the costs of maintaining the operation of such equipment. But we all know that the military usually does not spare funds for their projects, so in this case the issue of price is not the most important.

Via dvice