Such an operation could be expensive, but the benefits may be enormous: From a spot 15 miles West of Buffalo, over Lake Erie, 360-degree coverage provides direct coverage of some 500,000 square miles of territory, encompassing a great deal of the Great Lakes, of course, but also some of the most heavily populated areas of the US and Canada. Some of the cities within reach from that station may include these:
292 miles Buffalo to Washington
292 miles Buffalo to New York City
219 miles Buffalo to Detroit
279 miles Buffalo to Philadelphia
392 miles Buffalo to Cincinnati
435 miles Buffalo to Indianapolis (tall building/antenna)
483 miles Buffalo to Louisville (tall building/antenna)
Another skyhook positioned above the southern tip of Lake Michigan could reach all of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, with a reach to the West as far as Minneapolis. A skyhook positioned offshore south of Lake Charlie, Louisiana, or Port Arthur, Texas could reach as far inland as Little Rock and Dallas, and East and West as far as Mobile and San Antonio, while reaching offshore to cruise ships and oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. From a position above Great Salt Lake, Skyhook could provide television services to hundreds of thousands of rural residents in some 500,000 square miles of the Western United States, while providing in-flight TV viewing to every passenger of every flight of every airline operating anywhere over the Rockies. Potentially, this skyhook application could reach television and radio receivers on the ground in 3 Rocky Mountain states (Nevada, Utah, Wyoming), which are now inadequately covered by ground-based stations and cable outlets, and parts of 7 others similarly poorly covered (in particular, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon, California, Arizona, and New Mexico). Cities within this range could include Salt Lake City, Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada; Flagstaff, Arizona; Casper and Cheyenne, Wyoming; Boise and Pocatello, Idaho; Billings, Montana, Missoula, and Butte.
Given the additive factor of sending and receiving antenna altitudes in air-to-air communications ranging, Skyhook's reach beyond the horizon gives it a range to aircraft at cruising altitudes (i.e., 35,000 feet or more) of some additional 250 miles - extending the radius of Skyhook's reach to 670 miles, or quite nearly the distance from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, or Seattle. From 80,000 feet, Skyhook's combined air and ground range makes it possible to reach airborne receivers (i.e., airline passenger television) in 11 states (WA, ID, MT, WY, OR, NV, UT, CO, CA, AZ, and NM), and parts of 6 others (ND, SD, NE, KS, OK, and TX) - which is inclusive of flights over Phoenix and Los Angeles; San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Denver, Colorado.
It's hard to say it may really be possible to achieve this reach, of course. In order to do it, it may be necessary to use very large amounts of transmitting power, enhanced transmitting and receiving antennas, and digital-technology television, but the old bugaboo, "line-of-sight" limitations would no longer be a limiting, or deciding technical factor. These are among the possible scenarios, though there may be others, not nearly so obvious, but yet more advantageous, particularly when Skyhook is employed in combination with additional high technologies - and while sufficient justification for the skyhook project may already be provided by its potential for combination with technologies already in existence, there is unknown and unquantifiable potential for combination of skyhook with emerging forms of still-further-advanced technologies.
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