DARPA turns obsolete drones into flying Wi-Fi access points

We all suffer if the Internet is urgently needed, of any “quality”, but it is not there, neither wired nor wireless. Sometimes even in a large European city an access point has to be searched for a long time.

Well, for the military, the lack of communication can be like death, both literally and figuratively. And the agency DARPA plans to create a wireless network of several old UAVs.
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These unmanned aerial vehicles, the RQ-7, were used extensively during the Iraq war. And now most of these devices are without use in military warehouses. And military specialists thought about the possibility of turning a drone into a flying access point, providing a fairly large region with an Internet channel with a capacity of 1 Gbit / s.

The drones of the above model are large enough to carry the necessary equipment. The military developed a special receiving and transmitting equipment operating in the millimeter-wave radio frequency spectrum. In addition, the developed signal amplifiers, which operate at half the noise level, compared with the "civilian" network equipment of a similar type.

A drone can stay in the air for nine hours without refueling. Needless to say, the question arises about the possible scale of such a network and the cost of maintaining the operation of such equipment. But we all know that the military usually does not spare money for their projects, so in this case the issue of price is not the most important.

Via dvice