[Laser] Attempt on 200 km record in Australia.

[Chris L]

Dear people,

Woops I thought the XE prefix was Italy's - please accept my apology, all 
Mexican hams! Confucius say: "Place brain in gear before opening mouth"!

It would not be possible for me to compare our Luxeon's  power output with 
laser. We have about 0.5 watt (average) going into our 1 watt LEDs - half 
the maximum standing current that the Luxeon can take, to modulate equally 
upwards and downwards. How 0.5 watt of non-coherent power input to a Luxeon 
might equate to 10 mW of a laser's optical OUTPUT power I do not know - the 
laser may actually have more optical output power. I just cannot say as I 
have no efficiency figures for either... Perhaps somebody more theoretically 
minded could e-loo-see-date ? (!)

How the far-field flux equates would also be a matter for speculation.

I can say that it does help in practical terms to burn a little excess 
transmit power and to broaden the transmit beam so that directing the 
transmitter doesn't become tedious, finicky and time consuming.

I have just been sitting here reading the postings of the past month with my 
friend Tony Sanderson VK3AML. A comment that Tony has is that there is a 
dearth of material being posted from people with actual practical experience 
of operation. Not that theoretical discussions are of no value - but if the 
theory proposed is monstrously expensive to put into practice, there is 
little to be gained by further discussion. But I suppose we can all dream of 
being the Rupert Murdochs of this world, with an income equal to the Gross 
National Product of a banana republic.....! (Or maybe some of you blokes 
actually ARE millionaires - I dunno!)

We can say for sure that if you're in the average publicly funded University 
Physics labs today - unless they're PRIVATE universities, they won't have 
much of a budget either. (No, I don't like it either!)

All the best,

Chris Long and Tony Sanderson VK3AML.