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Posted (edited)

Isn't there solar powered drones already though?

Experimental, yes. http://www.newsweek.com/google-tests-solar-powered-internet-drones-421561

Commercial?

 

Solar doesn't work at night, and batteries are heavy ATM. Lithium air batteries might make them more practical. There's lots of EM at night, but not much light. An EM powered drone might trail a nanotube antenna.

Edited by EdEarl
Posted

WISP is not a drone. The power to fly something is likely many orders of magnitude larger than what they were doing, and if they were powering from something like an RFID reader, they were not drawing it from the environment. Ambient EM waves are going to be spread out over their spectrum, as opposed to a resonant system designed to transmit and receive a certain frequency.

 

I have a mini-drone that needs to be used indoors because it can't deal with much wind. 150 mAh battery at 3.7 V, and lasts 10-20 minutes. So that's ~200 mW of power to fly something with no payload. WISP runs on ~100 microwatts, or three orders of magnitude less.

https://wisp.wikispaces.com/ManagingPower

Posted

A bigger antenna can collect more, but 100 micro watts should be enough if the drone is around 0.02 gram. Otherwise, it would be necessary to beam energy to the drone, maybe as big as a butterfly.

Posted

A bigger antenna can collect more, but 100 micro watts should be enough if the drone is around 0.02 gram. Otherwise, it would be necessary to beam energy to the drone, maybe as big as a butterfly.

 

 

Which is lighter than any drone built (and those aren't autonomous), and antennas have mass.

  • 1 month later...
Posted

Unintentional existing EMF won't suffice for sure. From a dipole, you get -60dBm (=1nW), in altitude maybe -40dBm, from the FM and TV bands.

 

But radio beams from the ground have already powered aircraft, some two decades ago. The goal was to keep the craft airborne indefinitely in the lower stratosphere and use it as a broadcast antenna. I don't know what happens in a jet stream.

 

Then, one has to ask whether the huge-power ground station is any cheaper than gasoline and a second aircraft.

Posted

 

But radio beams from the ground have already powered aircraft, some two decades ago.

 

 

Citation/link, please.

Posted (edited)

Could my "Suns radiation conversion project " , not come into its own , on such a project .

 

Radiation conversion project :-

 

Link :- http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/89737-worlds-energy-requirements-may-be-within-our-technological-grasp/page-2#entry873880

 

 

Drawing of system dish :-

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/uploads/monthly_06_2015/post-33514-0-57660900-1435694901.jpg

 

Mike

Edited by Mike Smith Cosmos
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