The reason to use lasers rather than the proven RF communication is simple: bandwidth. The picture below is a sort of "proof" as to what I mean by this.
The calculations below are for a 12 GHz RF wave and a 200,000 GHz light beam. Hz is the unit of frequency meaning "cycles per second" or "on-off cycles per second."
What this value means is as follows: if a communication transmission requires 10 wavelengths (on -off cycles) to encode a simple 1 or 0 (high bit, low bit), then the laser would be able to send approximately 1700x more transmissions per second than the satellite.
The calculations below are for a 12 GHz RF wave and a 200,000 GHz light beam. Hz is the unit of frequency meaning "cycles per second" or "on-off cycles per second."
What this value means is as follows: if a communication transmission requires 10 wavelengths (on -off cycles) to encode a simple 1 or 0 (high bit, low bit), then the laser would be able to send approximately 1700x more transmissions per second than the satellite.
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