Bandwidth just got bigger. Potentially infinitely bigger.

[AtW]

That's exactly what SKA needs

[TimberWolf]

Is this not what terrestrial TV and satellite already do with horizontal and vertical polarisation?

It sounded to me a bit like circular polarisation encoding, but I don't know.

[TimberWolf]

Photon orbital spin (as opposed to quantum spin, which is different) must be very difficult to modulate, and perhaps even to receive/decode, because it's been known about since the 1870s (James Clerk Maxwell), and I've never come across OM radio.

Same thing presumably applies to polarisation modulation - I mean we don't hear of "PM radio" either, although I think another problem is that it's fairly directional, which obviouslt isn't ideal for radio. But it might be handy some day as an extra channel type in line-of-sight space comms for example.

Just did a bit of quick digging and people in the know appear to be saying it's over-hyped.

[OwlHoot]

Photon orbital spin (as opposed to quantum spin, which is different) must be very difficult to modulate, and perhaps even to receive/decode, because it's been known about since the 1870s (James Clerk Maxwell), and I've never come across OM radio.

Same thing presumably applies to polarisation modulation - I mean we don't hear of "PM radio" either, although I think another problem is that it's fairly directional, which obviouslt isn't ideal for radio. But it might be handy some day as an extra channel type in line-of-sight space comms for example.

[VectraMan]

Though it appears they have only sent two channels down one frequency so far.

Is this not what terrestrial TV and satellite already do with horizontal and vertical polarisation?

[TimberWolf]

Dumbed down version: BBC News - 'Twisted' waves could boost capacity of wi-fi and TV
Trickier version from the horse's mouth : Encoding many channels on the same frequency through radio vorticity: first experimental test

Basically they make use of the angular momentum in EM (radio) waves that potentially will allow an infinite number of channels to be encoded within a given frequency.

Though it appears they have only sent two channels down one frequency so far.

This novel radio technique allows the implementation of, in principle, an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques. This paves the way for innovative techniques in radio science and entirely new paradigms in radio communication protocols that might offer a solution to the problem of radio-band congestion.