OK,
My take on HF - it's unreliable. That's what makes it so much fun for
hams. You never know what you'll get. Maybe a few scratchy signals
from the next state, maybe a guy from South Africa booming in over long
path. It's like going fishing.
Commercial use, OTOH, is all about reliability. Line of sight, do your
calculations, build in your safety factor, and it mostly just works.
Used to be done with microwave dishes on mountaintops, now a lot of it
is via satellite. And undersea optical cables.
Commercial applications drive device development. So we have lots of
fancy new VHF/UHF transistors. Large public companies - who have the
resources to develop new parts - are very sensitive to quantity and
margin. So the engineer at the public company develops a whizbang new
microwave/pulse transistor, the stock bumps up, he cashes in some options,
and goes and buys himself a new Alpha linear for his ham station :).
- Jerry Kaidor, KF6VB
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