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by sevensor 3781 days ago
There are some severe physical limitations to work around here. Higher frequencies support higher bandwidth, but they tend to go right through the ionosphere rather than treating the ground-ionosphere system as a waveguide. Lower frequencies can propagate further (like AM radio at night), but as you drop the frequency there's suddenly a lot less spectrum to go around. And you need huge antennas.
1 comments

It stands to reason that the technology of the future does not yet make sense to us. Do you believe that we've already achieved the furthest possible wireless communication at low power? I think we can do better. This is pure speculation but I'm basing it on our past performance.
Yes, I believe we're at the limit of what we can do with electromagnetic radiation. That's not to say that there aren't other forms of wireless I haven't thought of, but we've been trying to squeeze bandwidth out of the electromagnetic spectrum for over a hundred years now, and its limitations are pretty well understood at this point. If we're all carrying neutrino-based communication devices in 2050, I'll be happily proven wrong.

This is not to say that there isn't exciting stuff going on in the QRP DX world (like JT65), but we're not breaking through the power-bandwidth-distance frontier, just finding interesting new ways to trade the three off against each other.