'Twisted' Waves Could Boost Capacity of Wireless Spectrum

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 2, 2012 @01:47AM from the make-them-squirm dept.

New submitter Ogi_UnixNut writes "In Venice, Italy, physicists have shown that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves, transmitted on the same frequency but encoded in two different orbital angular momentum states, to simultaneously transmit two independent radio channels. In principle this allows the implementation of an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques. It's potentially a boon for congested spectrum problems, although at the moment I suspect it would only work for directional links."

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Multipath by rullywowr · 2012-03-02 01:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

What about the issue of multipath, where one wave inverses the phase because its reflection arrives at the antenna slightly delayed from the original direct LOS (line of sight) signal?
I work with wireless microphones and deal with spectrum issues on a daily basis. With the shrinking spectrum, this would be extremely good news if it actually was feasible and practical in the real world. As it stands right now, two transmitters operating on the same frequency is simply a recipe for disaster.
oh yeah, first!