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by bprater 1565 days ago
As a reference, folks that fly quadcopters, drones and flying wings often will transmit at 1 to 2 watts of power using line of sight. (Yes, at the edge of legal.) .02 watts is an insignificant amount of power for radio transmission.
3 comments

It’s not edge if legal if you are a licensed ham operator. Then could fly with more than a thousand watts!

Of course you’d have a little problem with the battery :-)

I think it's much more fair to compare EIRP to EIRP, I don't know the gain of this crazy foil dish but it's probably pretty high. FPV is way harder since you can't use a highly directional transmit antenna and you're weight and size constrained, so you usually have dinky <3dB transmit gain and have to make up for it with big radio amplifiers.
Given a good control link such as ExpressLRS [0], people can also fly quadcopters 10+ kilometers on as little as 10 mW. See for example the range competition at [1].

Of course, the VTX is usually a different matter..

[0]https://www.expresslrs.org [1]https://www.expresslrs.org/2.0/info/long-range/