 Welcome to the RF Elements Unlicensed Podcast. I'm Caleb. Over there is Tossos. I'm over here. And today's episode, we're super excited to be having Ken Ruppel from Aviat here today. So it's gonna be a real fun conversation. We're gonna be talking about license links, Aviat experiences, fun things, goofy things, so on and so forth. So kind of really excited to see where this goes. But before we launch into that real quick, Tossos give the good people out there their call to action. Absolutely. Don't forget to like, listen, or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube or anywhere you download your audio podcasts like Apple, Google, or Spotify. All right, y'all. Well, let's make like a frog and hop to it. So, Ken, my man, so good to have you. Glad you could, glad you could make it to our humble little podcast and real excited to talk to you today and get some history, learn a bit about you, learn a bit about Aviat, and then license links or whatever you guys got popping, whatever's interesting, weird game for. So again, thanks for being here, man. Good deal. No, it's totally my pleasure. I appreciate the invitation. Thanks, guys. So for those out there that don't know you, Ken, if you kind of give us a history about, you know, your background in the industry, you've been doing this a long time. But if you give us some background, Ken, let us know how you came up with Aviat, what you do there. And we can just kind of roll from there. Well, yeah, I think he just called me old, but I do that for myself, too. So that's okay. Yeah. We're included in that club, too. I don't feel that. I think I branded myself one of those, you know, official old guys. So that's all right. You know, at this point in my, you're an OG. Yeah, there you go. I like it. Yeah, the history is interesting. I've been doing a little thinking about this. It's like, how did this all happen? It's a weird little story, but it's kind of fun. So I'll go ahead and turn back the clock. I was in, so it kind of starts off, there's a couple of different tracks. When I was a kid, I was really good at math. So like that was something I was into, and because I was good at it. So and, and I was also a musician. And so like I like playing music, I got into bands like in junior high and high school. And one of my bandmates, he was into music and electronics. And he, and I couldn't afford all the stuff that I wanted to buy at the music store, but he taught me how to, how to build stuff. So he had these circuit diagrams and things and he was building amplifiers and all these kinds of different gadgets for the music stuff. And I got into that saying, well, I need a mixer and I need an amplifier and I need a fuzz box and all these kinds of things. So he taught me how to do some basic electronics. And following sort of that angle, because there's a separate angle that sort of teased into this, I ended up working for a junior high, junior and high school. I think I left my job at Baskin Robbins and got my first official job in the electronics industry and started doing BC board assembly and QA for this little company in my town. And I grew up in Silicon Valley, by the way. So it's kind of like easy to get an electronics job. It was kind of like all there was here. But from there, so one day this is how it kind of ties together. One day I'm going into a summertime right before my freshman year in college. And my company that I've been working for for two years says, you know, summer, we're not really going to be able to keep you on full time with all the extra hours that you normally like to do in the summer because I like to build up all my cash in summer and spend it on school. And they said, so if you can find some of the gig, that'd be great for you, great for us. Hey, you can't find anything, we'll take you on whatever hours we can. So I'm literally sitting in the kitchen table with my drummer and his dad because my drummer's dad's house is where we used to practice. And so we spent a lot of time there and made a lot of noise. And I'm telling him, yeah, man, I'm kind of bummed. It doesn't look like I'm going to be able to make much money this summer. I got to find some new job. Well, his dad overhears me and he says, hey, you know, my my company has a summer internship program. And my friend who the drummer was working at his dad's company full time at that point. And I had no idea what to do. I said, yeah, you know, I'm game, you know, he said, well, you're kind of into electronics, you go into engineering school and all that. That sounds perfect. And let me see if I can get you in. I don't think I'd interviewed for anything. So anyway, ultimately, I get this job at a company called Harris Farronan. And Harris Farronan is obvious. That's the irony of the whole thing is my first microwave job was my freshman year at college or the summer before my freshman year in college over 40 years ago. So you can do the math and figure out how old I am. And and that was building their very first digital microwave radios 15 feet tall. I built six gigahertz one six gigahertz radio and one 11 gigahertz radio took me all summer to build two radios on the ground from the ground at the top of the stack. And my job was basically to build the very first ones in a pseudo production line and write up ECOs for how it can be done better. Like if this screw goes in first before that screw or this screw should be longer or this wire should be over there and not over here, address this way, whatever, you know, whatever it would take to make it easier to build these things. I'd never built one for the engineers had put one together. And that's it. So these are the very first digital microwave radios ever built. I know maybe some other company had ever had done it. But but that was what Abia was or what Harris Farron on this to me at the time. So I spent a summer there. They actually offered me an ongoing internship program, but it would have been really distracted to my engineering degree that I wanted to go after. And so that kind of launched me into I had no idea what these things even did, frankly, they're just this guy, not to wave guide weird parts, all sorts of weird things that you've never seen. So then I get into college and I'm and I want to be an engineer whenever they know I did what an engineer does. Frankly, it's like, that's what math nerds do, you know, they go into engineering. That's what everybody does. It's looking value going to engineering. So that's what I did. And ultimately, I ended up having a college professor who was an industry guy who got me in very interested in microwaves. He was just like, I don't know whether that was his passion, but he taught a microwave course, I got into it. I really, really liked it. The company I had been working for that one that had that one summer break was actually like fiber optics company. That's an odd thing to say they don't weren't really doing fiber optics, they're using fiber optics in their technology. So I had, I had touched fiber optics and light sensors and things like that. So I knew kind of a little bit about that. I really passionate about microwave. And it's kind of weird to say, you know, most people don't get a degree in microwave, but I effectively got a degree in microwave. So that's, you know, that kind of got me started. I got through college. Thank God. Exactly. It's like, my parents are like, you better do this in four years, buddy. A lot of people graduate college in eight years. Yeah, exactly. All doctors, right? Or philosophers. Yeah, something like that. No offense to anybody, philosophers out there. The, yes, some are still in school, I guess. But, you know, from there, it was weird. I ended up working for a company right out of college. I went working for a military company, basically. And they were doing reconnaissance equipment for the military. This was like, still before the Cold War, if anybody remembers that. And, and so I was involved in microwave reconnaissance, which is a really weird industry, but it has to do with radio reception, antennas, direction finding antennas, horns. I mean, obviously it's in horns. And, you know, one of you guys was born. And, and then I'm not saying which one, by the way. But anyway, I, you know, and so I'm into this microwave field now, basically helping design microwave receivers. And inclusive to that was some something called spread spectrum. And so we were trying to figure out how to receive spread spectrum signals and decode them. This was a very challenging task. Military technology, you know, trying to figure out how to receive this intelligence and the ways like signals. That was fun. Always interesting. The best part of that story was that the Cold War basically ended. The wall came down, which I recall President Reagan was a president at that time in the U.S. and he had a problem. And the problem was that he was going to have a big workforce problem in the United States because the military industry was going to implode. So he had some really good ideas and they funded a bunch of grants into the military companies to look for opportunities to take military electronics and use them for commercial applications. I don't know how I got all involved in this, but there's all sorts of weird little windy stories and I won't get into the details. But ultimately what happened was I got aligned into some of this spread spectrum like it was going on. And there were some guys with ideas and we did a whole bunch of testing in the labs and like this stuff works. We could communicate using spread spectrum and we could use these bands that are otherwise useless, like the band that's being used by our microwave ovens. I mean, you know, we basically couldn't use those bands. We had our big ideas. We did a bunch of lab work. And in combination with that, I was kind of getting tired of my company. I had left a boss that I wasn't really aligned well with, gone into a different division, and then ultimately they just brought me back under that same boss that I grew up. I think I'm done here. So right at that confluence of timing, I found a bunch of people who I'd worked with at Harris Farron on, they had gone on to form this company called Western Multiplex. And I was out looking for a job and all sorts of really fun things going on at the time. Very beginning of sort of really cool radio technology. And so I got aligned into an opportunity to go work for this company, Western Multiplex. And lo and behold, they had already started working on spread spectrum microwave radio. There weren't any regulations. There was no such thing as an ISM band, by the way. If there was one, it's not like what we know in a day. Nobody was doing anything like this, which was sort of cool. So I came into this company who had been doing analog microwave radio, a little bit of digital microwave radio. They were just getting ready to think about spectrum. They were working with the FCC to create regulations that would allow that spread spectrum stuff to be used and trying to get ahead of the curve, which is really interesting. By the way, if you ever get an opportunity like this, you should take it, where you're actually inventing equipment before the regulations exist that allow that equipment to be used. The only one doing it, you're pushing it to make it happen. And then when the market opens, it's all yours. It was pretty exciting. We built a product called the Lynx, LYNX. If anybody remembers it out here in Radio Land, good for you. I mean, she probably as old as me. But we came out with a T1 spread spectrum radio at 2.4 gigahertz, which was a brand new band at the time. And we were lobbying at that time to create the 5.8 gigahertz spectrum at the same time, a 900 megahertz spectrum sort of came along with it. It wasn't really good for what we were trying to do. And we had a lot of fun, Western Multiplex. Actually, I go back and look at all my days of working the best times, just creative genius and having a lot of good ideas and throwing a bunch of ideas to the wall and see what sticks and big things happen. That's where it happened for me. We were selling T1 radios like crazy. We had to convince people that unlicensed didn't mean unreliable. Now, it's really tricky to use them temporarily to turn up the thing. We're still doing that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, it kind of went from everybody thought it'd be unreliable, then it became like, no, this stuff is really reliable. And then it became unreliable. And then technology had to make it reliable again. It's like, it's all about how to use it. Here's the crazy thing. Most of the systems I was putting in had like six-foot dishes on them. P1s, maybe going seven miles or something with a six-foot dish because that's what the cellular companies were used to doing. It was no big deal. They put a four or six-foot dish on a radio all day long and they could turn up a T1 service in a day. They could turn up a cell site while they were literally waiting for the T1 to arrive. Well, the T1 didn't arrive for another year or two and these guys would go, hey, cancel that T1. This radio has been working fine. And so that got us going. It took us a little while. But we did two T1s after a bit. We did four T1s actually against the better judgment of all my customers. They said, well, never buy four T1s. That's way too much capacity for a non-license. Yeah, that's a whole six gigabits, everybody. I'm sorry, 16 megabits. Yeah, so that was the risky stuff, but we did all that. And then here comes the turn. So we were talking one day, we had all sorts of ideas. We put SNMP in a radio. We were the first ones to ever do that. It's like, hey, somebody needs to do something that's publicly accessible in all these private network management systems. We put SNMP in a radio. We did a bunch of fun things. We did the removable die flexor, which was this idea. If you didn't have to have a channel plan, you could just remove the die flexor, swap them, flip them over, that kind of thing. We came, we finally, I don't know what caused this one day. I think I was reading up on something, this new thing called Ethernet. We were in our building. I think we had just rewired our building from Token Ring. Token Ring, yeah, what do you say? Ethernet. And we said, you know, this Ethernet thing has promise. We think this could go somewhere. And so we started wondering if we could use radio to transport Ethernet. And there was a company, RAD, there's still RAD communications, not to be confused with RAD when they could come out. They were starting to do these little boxes that did Ethernet to T1 conversion, that kind of thing. They had a little device called a tiny bridge. Does anybody here remember tiny bridge? vaguely familiar. It was basically an Ethernet to T1 or something like that converter. So we bought a couple of those and we thought, hey, let's try something out. We stepped one of them in front of our T1 radio, put one literally in the wall plug of my office, where the Ethernet connected to my computer, moved my computer across the room, put another one there, pointed at a couple of radios, maybe with paper clips connected to them, to see if we could get Ethernet across the room. And lo and behold, I could get on to whatever it is we used to do with computers back then, I guess ancient email. We did that and it was kind of, it's like, oh, this works. Okay. So now we just need to sort of integrate that in the box. And now we have an Ethernet radio, sort of take a risk. So we did that two megabit Ethernet radio was built on our E1 product, because that was more than T1. And that got us going. We did a little college IT project. We connected a local college to a local hosting site, like five, maybe six miles, probably still 2.4 gigahertz. And it worked. And that was, to me, like the beginning of outdoor point-to-point wireless Ethernet. Career goes on. Western Multiplex acquired a company called Proxim. Proxim is still in business. They changed their name to Proxim. Also, there's a story behind that. I ended up leaving that company and going to Exalt Communications. I was employee number six in Exalt. A bunch of Western Multiplex people basically found it in Exalt. And we did that run. We had a lot of fun at Exalt, too. We did, made a lot of really cool products, a lot of new groundbreaking stuff. And then the wheels kind of fell off there. And I ended up doing some independent consulting, worked for a microwave construction company for a couple years, worked for Fastback Networks as a consultant for a couple years, and then ended up at Aviat. So that's kind of like, that's a long history story. It was really interesting. To me, I go back and look at that and say, you know, if it weren't for the bass player in my band being into electronics, if it weren't for my drummer's dad working for a microwave company, you know, probably none of that stuff happens. And you sort of just watch that legacy. And I've just really enjoyed this career. It's been a lot of fun. That's, yeah, that's really cool. I mean, I have never seen or used a Togan ring network, right? So it's pretty cool. You're already ancient too. So so you can only imagine how old I feel younger now. Thank you. Thanks for everything on the show. This is fantastic. Everything's in sepia tone. So no, no, we kid, we kid. So no, but that's that's a wild history. I mean, there's a lot of names there that I mean, a lot of people listening to this have probably never heard of or, you know, saw an old box somewhere, some documentation in the cell site somewhere, and they're like, hey, I've heard of these people somewhere. But yeah, the name was, you know, the tsunami radio. So we branded the Ethernet brand of the Lynx radio tsunami. We had this idea for a marketing campaign behind that. So we just kind of like, okay, that's the name we're going to put on it. There's this weird fun fact that came up in Wisp Talk not too long ago where somebody showed a picture or one is that I found one of these things sitting in my rack and it has a teal colored front panel on it. And we got the San Jose sharks here in the Bay Area in the early 90s. And I was a sharks fan or I was a hockey fan. So I became a sharks fan and and their color was teal. So like, I managed to sneak in the teal colored front panel onto the tsunami because you know, nobody knew that that was the connection. That's awesome. That is wild. So as you can imagine, the state of the license leak market, especially in the Wisp industry has grown a lot tremendously. I mean, even just the last few years, it's just been wild to see the growth from, you know, used to be, oh, single core, you know, I got a six gig single core link, man, I got, you know, 500 megs, 700 megs, whatever it may be. Man, this is all the bandwidth I'm going to need on this site. And then it turned into dual core and then it turned into overlaps. Now, you know, they'll be pushing the e-band and everything else. So, you know, the industry, especially within the Wisp market has just grown by leaps and bounds lately. So kind of want to get your insight as to the state of the market license links specifically in the Wisp industry. I know that's the area that your branch focuses on with Aviat. So I mean, Aviat is a big, big public company all over the world. But, you know, your focus is primarily on the Wisp market. So, you know, kind of give us some insight to see how you've seen this market progress and grow over the years, where it is now, and where do you think it may be going? Yeah, that's a, that's a big wide feel. It's an interesting thing. So I mean, I think, so first of all, yeah, you mentioned on the Aviat side, so we weren't even doing Wisp business three years and two months ago. That was something that, you know, sort of came along when I came to the company. It was a pitch. I was like, hey, you guys build these great outdoor radios. You're missing out on this huge market opportunity. I think we could build this. And, and so they, you know, they basically let me run and said, okay, I'm going to bring you on. Let's see what you can do. And it was the business side of it was a little tricky. It was like, well, we can't really, we, we built really high quality, perhaps high cost radios. So we really couldn't compete in the same fashion as other companies. So this, this concept of sell direct support direct, cut the cost out, you know, try to find ways to just sort of streamline the business and, and run it that way. I was a one-man shop at Aviat for the Wisp industry in North America for two years until about a year ago when I picked up an engineer. So now I have an engineer. It's an hour two, you know, and it's actually pretty astounding. I say that there's a whole lot of supporting cast. I don't want to, I don't want to make that sound incredible. And there's a whole bunch of people who make it happen in the back end, but from the front end, as far as like customer interaction accounts and designing links and getting them, you know, getting the right bills and materials together. It's just me and Ben Santa Maria. And so it's been pretty, it's been a pretty fun ride, pretty successful. We've catapulted from zero to hero pretty much, you know, the double the market share of our number two. But yeah, you know, getting to the point of where you're at, you know, I think, so Microwave Radio's got its limitations. I work for Microwave Radio Company, so I'm just going to sit out loud. You know, the biggest challenge is that the country you're in, no matter what country you happen to be in, is it has regulations regarding maximum channel bandwidth. And maximum channel bandwidth is going to scale to a certain amount of capacity. And we're pretty, I mean, I used to say we were pretty topped out in modulation back when we were doing 256-quam, but we're topped out in modulation right around 4096-quam. You know, we could go higher, but the benefits are just really diminished, right? You know, so you lose a whole bunch of threshold, you've got to have cleaner spectrum, and you get an itty-bitty bit more data out of it. It's just not worth it, you know? So I don't know that modulation is where it's at anymore. I mean, if somebody does come out with a whatever the next thing is up, I frankly just don't think it's going to matter. So you're pushing, you know, 10 more bits or 100 more bits or whatever it is. It's just not going to do it. So the only place we have left to go is really stacking channels. We've got a whole bunch of channels, you know, get as much spectrum as we can from whatever bands we can get it all. And put a whole bunch of radio up. And we're doing plenty of that. We've got customers using 6, 11, 18, maybe 23 added into that, you know, getting as much spectrum as they can on a given path and just getting all those channels bonded together and put all that capacity together in one big pipe if they can. You know, spectrum availability is just really hard. It's getting harder and harder. You know, I remember visiting a Verizon guy in the late 90s and looking at his six gigahertz, he had a string map up on his wall was like 12 foot high 12 foot wide at the LA basin. He was in charge of Verizon. And he had all his six gig radios on strings. And it looked like there was a room for another string in the late 90s. So, you know, you can only imagine what spectrum looks like now. The, you know, the spectrum coordinators do a great job. But they've got their work cut out for them. And it's really getting harder and harder. So, there's really only, you know, so we're doing we're doing interesting things. Obviously, you know, we we got into eband, 80 gigahertz, 70, 80 gigahertz, lightly licensed radios. And we didn't really get into that band primarily so that we could go after the eband market. What we saw was the same we call multiband market, right? But we could take eband and combine it with microwave and supplant that together. And the concept basically being is you could get somewhat reliable 10 gigabits, you know, you get 10 gigabit link and even you could add some microwave to it. And then you've got aggregated capacity. So you're getting better capacity even during the light rain, you get the out of capacity all the time, not a failover that kind of thing. And it's trying to change that mindset to say you have true reliable connections. But you guys know it like I do. Everybody wants to push technology as far as you can go, you know. The spec sheet said 10 gigs, 10 miles. I want it. Yeah. How far does eband go? Yeah, how far can it go? Yeah. And here's the thing, you know, I think since I was a young man in this industry, everybody always says, you know, how far can you go? I said, well, you know, I can go 150 miles if that's what you want. That's physics is not stopping us from going distance. You know, it's distance. Regulation is. Yeah. Regulation and ultimately reliability, right? I mean, this is the thing that, you know, if I were to say, you know, one thing that nobody's ever used radios before, they got to understand this. You have to decide how reliable you want your connections to be, and you're in charge of that. You have the opportunity to make very reliable connections, but it usually takes money, you know, bigger dishes or like in your cases, narrower sectors, you know, whatever it might be, narrower channels, more of them, you know, all these things that ultimately can pump up your reliability, but they all cost money. And so I have e-band customers who are very uncomfortable doing two-mile links. I have other e-band customers that are very comfortable doing nine-mile links. I think they're busy and I think, I mean, I would not do that if it were my network, but it's not my choice. You know, my role is to tell them what to expect and say, listen, we put all the math we can put to this. We've taken a lot of user experience. We've tried to apply that into it and say, hey, this is what we think you'll get. This is what is likely going to happen. And then you get to decide if that's good enough for you. But getting back to Taylor, what you asked, it's kind of like, you know, where do we go from here? You know, it's tricky. I think this, number one, somebody said it on one of your earlier podcasts is that if Wisps aren't considering how they do what the cell guys did way back when my town used to have one cell site in the middle of town and then they built another one and then they split the difference and went in the middle and they cut down their power and they covered a smaller area and they reuse that frequency over and over by, by continuing to do cell splitting. And if you follow that model into the WISP industry, we're really facing this point, not just for the WISP point of multipoint of the edge access equipment, but also for the backhaul. Because you've got technologies out there now at the edge, you know, let's talk about TeraGraph or 60 gig or Terran or any sort of high density, high capacity, last mile solution. And you've got, I've got customers who are doing everything. They're doing, you know, CVRS and 5 gig and 24, you know, they're stacking their cell sites so that they can do their short reach stuff on one technology and the medium reach stuff on other technologies and long reach technologies because they're just out of spectrum. And so I think it was Brandon Hardy or maybe one of the guys on your podcast who said, hey, you know, what we're really looking to try to do is keep our distance between sites, you know, within a certain range because, you know, if we can do that, then our backhaul can support it, the high capacity, and it gives us the range and reach that we need, you know, to deliver higher capacities out to the patch that we're trying to cover. And that's really, you know, it's pretty simple when you think about it, you know, but ultimately, a lot of risks start off, you know, with the one site on the hill or the one in town. And then you go do your second one. And I think it's right around the second one, or maybe the third one, where you had to start, if you want to be in business for another five or 10 years, you need to start strategically thinking about exactly where are those locations going to be that would leverage me being able to do things like cell splitting, things like cutting down these distances so I can deliver more capacity uniformly. The other part of that is, I guess, protection, you know, having multiple routes. I mean, I know a lot of our risks are using maybe more than one fiber provider or fiber from the east and fiber from the west and coming and that kind of thing. That's great. But in the whole topology of the backhaul, that's becoming more and more critical as well. So where are we going? You know, I think right now, we do multi-band in one box with 10 gigs and a microwave radio that can give you two channels. That's about a gig and a half of capacity. So when it rains heavy, you can still get a gig and a half, you get an extra capacity along the way. That's not bad. Where we just launched a new technology that can make that even better. It's a little more complex. It's a little more money, but we can push that 10 gigabits a little bit harder. We can push the gig and a half a little bit harder as well. Of course, that just means either some customers are getting better reliability on the distance they find or everybody just wants to go further now. Isn't it always the same? It's like, oh, now how far can I push it? It's like, hey, man, that's up to you. I know what I'm comfortable with. I'll tell you what I think it's going to do. You get to this side. I think we're just going to see more of that. I mean, it's maybe pretty simple. We're going to start seeing the stacking of e-band channels. We have a two-channel e-band that is 20 gigabits. But if you run it in a cross-pole fashion, you can run it at 10 gigabits and get 13 dB of extra system gain. 13 dB is a lot of system gain. So we can take a 10 gigabit circuit that used to do, say, 4 miles reliably, whatever that means to a particular customer. And we can make that do 6 miles. Or for that, we can just do better at hanging on to 10 gigabits over a shorter distance. I think really everything is up. Where the spectrum is, is higher frequency. Higher frequencies don't propagate very well. You're going to need shorter distances. The only way you're going to get high capacity is shorter distances. Yeah. And it's playing well, I think. It's just naturally kind of, you know, that the pieces are falling into place because really the point of multipoint at a very lower EIRP limit at these higher modulation rates are forcing these cell sites to be even smaller than, like say, the minimum distances that you hope for on your back calls, right? So it's actually playing quite well where it's like, you know, going to be a mile or something like that. So you're talking maybe two mile back calls, right, on this EVAN stuff, which is, you know, a good spot for it to be in on average, I would think in, you know, wet and of course in dry environments. But even splitting that in the middle sounds like it's all coming together. Yeah, I think so. Especially we're talking about like sticky gig access, you know, that distance plays very nicely with an EVAN back call, like you said, that sort of double the distance of the cell site, right? Yeah. So those physics play pretty nicely. And if capacity, you know, who'd ever think it'd be where we are today? And I think back to my two megabits story, right? That was enough for an entire college. I was there in an service, you know, an hour a day, and I got a whole lot more than that coming into my house. So, you know, I got to think that, I know a lot of people think that capacity's kind of topped out, but we would have said that two decades ago. And so, you know, there's always going to be technology. I mean, I've joked about this a little bit, but you know, I want to have my holographic cousin over for dinner. You know, I mean, why not? I mean, you can mark my words, that's kind of happening. So, you know, I want to have my holiday. What's that? It's your fault. That's why there's this push to put ungodly amounts of bandwidth to everybody's houses for things like that. Exactly. Come on. Where's the real human experience? You don't need bandwidth to have somebody in real life come visit and have dinner with you. You know, I'm kidding. No, I know, but we used to do this kind of thing, right? Yeah, I know. Two decades ago, it was fantasy land that we could look down at our wrist and see our buddy talking to us, but we can do that now. Was that the Dick Tracy watch, right? Wasn't that the thing back in the day? Yeah. I was actually alive then. That was the 60s. I'm surprised you know that. We're a good historian. Yeah, we know why people back in the 60s had those like crazy ideas and stuff like that for like talking to my watch, you know? Well, I don't live too far from San Francisco. So, you know, there was a lot of imagination going on that time. Yes, yes. But, you know, I, yeah, I don't want to like just throw the question away and say, hey, you know, technology, you know, there's probably another, another element to this. There was something I kind of, I was thinking about what we might talk about. One of the things I wanted to kind of emphasize is there was, I forget exactly who you were talking to about like the rise of early 11 gigahertz, you know, inexpensive licensed radios and what was going to happen, right? And, you know, notably the AF11 and B11 kind of game changers for the Wisps, you know, and I, and I honor that because, you know, I used to drive a pretty bad car before I made some money and I had to make some money to get a better car and, and I had to drive to work. So guess what? I'm going to buy that bad car, you know? I'm not saying they're bad radios, but I'm just saying, you know, you might not afford what you want at the time that you want it and you're going to have to build yourself up and get that. And I think what I'm trying to do with a lot of the Wisps is educate them to understand that the choices that they make early are going to potentially impact their ability to grow their Wisps later. Yes. Preach, brother. Preach. Preach. Yeah. It's tough because somebody makes a decision to say, well, I'm going to do this thing and I'm not going to name names, but just say, you know, I'm going to do this thing. And I'm going to, and, and that's where I've already done that thing. That's what happens to me. I get the phone call saying, I got this going on and show me their network and I go, man, this is, this is going to be tough to change one link to a higher capacity, to add one more link to your network. Guess what you're going to have to do? Tear it all out and start over. That's the bad news. And that's happened. I've had a guy who had three links to something and he wanted to upgrade one of them. And I said, guess what? We're going to have to upgrade all three. There is no way you're going to be able to do this. Back himself into a corner with his original network design, not by going cheap, but by going cheap and not seeking some education to understand how the decisions he was making could impact his growth in the future. And I guess that that's, you know, that's kind of like my final offer and mission in my life is to say, Hey, you know, I'm here. I'm very embedded in the Wisp industry. I have a lot of passion for it. I want to do as much to educate the Wisp on making good decisions, not to buy aviated equipment. That's great. You know, also plenty of radios. I want to make sure that people are wasting, you know, or not thinking about where they are going, you know, where they might end up going, you know, in a short amount of time. If they're successful, let's say, let's face it, all these folks, they would like to be successful. So imagine if you were successful and how will your network look at that point. And thinking about that and sort of working backwards for them, what can I do today to implement technology in such a way that I'm not wasting my money? I'm spending it wisely and it allows me that growth opportunity as I go. It's very complex and we're not going to cover all that detail. But in my world of backhaul, it can be done. You can start off with those little cost equipment, and you can do it in such a way that allows you to build your business and then move your business up the chain as you start getting more capacity and more subscribers. But there's also ways to do it wrong. And that's really a challenge. Yeah, it is. And education is the key on everything. And we're seeing it more and more where, you know, some manufacturers are stepping up to the plate and doing the right thing. And it's like you said, it's not about selling your products, about doing the right thing because it makes the industry sustainable. And, you know, all around benefits everybody, including yourself. So, you know, naturally, there's a natural benefit for you in that. But that's not the goal of, you know, doing it. So it's great to see you guys doing that too. Thanks. Now, I mean, sort of being that certified old guy, we said at the beginning, I feel like that's that's the point for me. You know, at this point, I'm kind of in the twilight of my career, I look and say, well, what can I do? You know, this decision to go back into the waste industry again, was really a decision for myself to say, hey, I have some great technology, I can educate, I can be assistance to a lot of companies have a lot of input to help this industry grow. And, you know, who knew the pandemic was coming and who knew that a whole bunch of broadband funding was coming or whatever other other things coming to the table together that could help, you know, move this industry as well. It's been magical. You know, that I wanted to tell a story. How did this all start? And, you know, there was a project I worked on. So we built this thing called the tsunami. And way back when I got a phone call, I think, from a guy who was running a county office of education and a rural part of California, very poor part of California. And he had this vision. And, you know, this was not my vision. It was his. He says, hey, you know, I want to find a way to connect the kids that go to my schools, you know, because if I can connect them, it was like the early idea of digital divide, it didn't really, there was those words didn't exist back and we're talking like 1996. So, you know, before the internet was really a thing. And well, as it was becoming, I think, I guess, is probably the right way to say it. But he had this vision. He said, you know, how could we do this? And so I got together with him. He'd heard about us. We sat down and and and designed an internet network for his school district, you know, using sticks and stones and paper clips, I guess, you know. And we we and we actually realized his vision and it and it had a deep impact on me. I was like, wow, you know, I can actually doing my job, I can make a difference to a community of impoverished people. That was huge in my in my career, you know, just to say, okay, I want more of that, you know, because it ultimately, you know, I don't want to get too philosophical, but ultimately, I hope everybody, you know, watches this podcast or, you know, who, you know, thinks about that. It's like, what am I really, why am I really doing what I'm doing? What is kind of matter when I'm done doing what I'm doing? And I think the Wisp industry is just the heart of that to me, you know, especially on the technology side, there's probably other, there's other industries that are as well when I'm a technology guy, I'm in the radio. It's like, wow, Wisp industry, there's nothing better because we can do this and we are doing it. And it's just super exciting. It's just it's just so much fun to be even just a small part of connecting people, who otherwise wouldn't be connected and then giving them an opportunity to be, you know, to contribute more, to learn more, all need to be connected more, you know, even if it's just a Zoom call with grandma, you know, heck, you know, that's, that's amazing. So it's, it's, you know, that to me is like, I want to do as much of that as I can before I'm done. Now I've got myself contemplating my whole existence and small, it's such a crisis. So, but it's coming back around and coming back around. I'm like, yeah, no, so that's so good. It's all good. I think if you made, you know, if you continued to make a lot of barbecue, but you shared more barbecue. Yep. Yeah. Share your bacon. I won't share the bacon. I'll share your bacon. Anything else I will share. The bacon is a little, I hold it a little close though. So, but no, you know, what you say is, I mean, it's so many people are in this because of that, because they want to make their community better. They want to make their neighborhood better and just to provide information. You know, it's the best way that we can do it now and it's what drives tosses to me and, you know, so many people that are off elements, just being a part of that and being a part of something. So that's, that's really great. It's extremely motivating. Yeah. And cool voice. Yeah, we get to, we could play with technology, which is really fun too. Yeah, I was thinking about, there were a couple of things. Also, you know, I talked a lot about radio, but I noticed, you know, like, I'm going to say, I think it was Chris Johnson, who was talking about DC power and stuff like this. It's like, yeah, let's listen closely, you know, grounding. I think Josh was talking about grounding. Chris was talking about DC power. It's like, these are the kinds of things and these fundamental things that if you start off right and you learn these things, you know, I mean, it's just as important to learn things like routing and netting. You know, I mean, there's always networking things as, well, I'm not all that good at that. I'm good on the RS side, but the DC power train is the train I've been on for years. It's like, Hey, everybody, in the days of POE, you know, that was, that was fun while it lasted. But when you're properly applying POE, that's fine. But for things like back calls that are doing more than a gigabit capacity, I still wonder why some of my customers are using POE. It's like, Hey, use fiber, we can use DC power. It'll be cheaper and it'll be more reliable. Wouldn't you like both of those things? A lot of people get tunnel vision, you know, only understand how to do some way. And some of it's just not that sexy, you know, so your multiplayer, I've got the, the brand, this new system and these new standards and I can add, you know, because they think I put up an access point, I put up all these clients, it's immediate business, you know, I'm raking into money or they're, they're, you know, the back hauls, you know, a lot of people don't pay that much attention to back hauls, especially in the beginning, because they're like, okay, yeah, I'll get the traffic there somehow. You know, or when I get the clients added, I'll get it there. And I was like, well, let's not have the math works. But, you know, people will sweat the details. So do I have five nines here? Do I have six nines? It's the most ultra reliable radio ever. And then have some sort of chicken wire janky nonsense for DC power distribution or power distribution in general, right? So, you know, you got six nines out of your lane, it doesn't do you any good when your power is out two or three times a month because you're on a bad leg or something like that. So it's an all encompassing thing you've got to think about in terms of not just performance and numbers, but I mean, your customer service and your reliability or your reviews and feedback and stuff like that, you know, I was, I mean, there's so much I admire the wisdom just because there's so, there's so many unique technologies that you actually have to master, right? You know, you can't be just good at IP, you know, you can't be just good at radio, you can't be just good at DC power and grounding, you know, or site, site construction or something like, I think you got to hit all those things. And on top of that, marketing, customer service, and, you know, building, you know, my, you know, it's like, well, this gets long. And it's like, but we've got some pretty impressive people, you know, so, and that doesn't always have to fall in one person. Ideally, you can hire out consultants, a lot of big companies that have popped up that are kind of like addressing, you know, some of those, you're not, you know, you're not an IP wizard, well, there's IP wizards around, you know, you can get one as a consultant or, or whatever, a rent one, if you want to call it that. And you can, or you can start learning, you know, if you, I mean, one of the things I'd say is, you know, I mean, on that front is if you don't know something and you hired somebody to help you do something, you're doing yourself a disservice by not standing right next to them while they're doing because, you know, ultimately, you need to learn more about that thing that you're hiring out. So you can start cutting some costs and doing it yourself, you know, and getting a little further along, you're paying somebody to do some, some work for you. It'd be a good idea, good opportunity to try to learn more while you're doing it. Yeah, understanding the solution. So if you've ever got to make a pivot to someone else, or, you know, fix it on your own and stuff like that. So I mean, it's one of the great things is we've seen standardizations, probably the wrong word for it. But we're seeing, we're seeing more and more people kind of get on the same page with whether it be power distribution, surge protection, finally, you know, the network and building your rings, like, you know, some of these things kind of pop up a lot more reliably and regularly than they used to in the past. So that's great. And there's a lot of consultants available, a lot of shared knowledge, more and more vendors are getting to be, you know, educational, not from a, hey, this is just our product, but this is how our product also fits in the ecosystem. That's great. But at the same time, you know, you do understand, you've got to understand the nuts and bolts, and you don't have to be the electrician where you are, but you're probably going to need a little bit of those electrician skills or, you know, be the network engineer that's like, oh, sometimes you have to pick up shovels. What happens? Well, you know, we're, the three of us are probably, you know, our relationship is sort of built on the fact that things like with talk exist, for example. And that is a beautiful thing if you really look at it, because you've got, you know, a few hundred consultants available to you with one post, right? You just say, hey, I need to know more about this who can help me, or I've got, I've got this problem where I'm facing this situation. And you've got vendors and other wisps all coming in and saying, hey, you know, here's, here's my perspective on it. Now, some of that, you got to weed through it, you know, you're going to get 10 different answers from 10 different people. But that's okay too, you know, you have to, you have to weed because it's not, so it's not always a one solution fits all, you know, it never is, you know, so well, you know, tell me more about your specific situation, you know, there's some folks out on the group that I love about that. They'll say, well, you know, you, before we can answer your question, you got to answer these 17 questions because for specifics matter, you know, we can give you a nice general answer, but the more information you tell us about what you're facing, the more we'll be able to kind of hone in and tell you what the right things are what the best things for you. And you know, a lot of it is going to be trial and error. A lot of it is going to be, well, we tried this and it didn't work. And, and so we're going to try something else, hopefully it didn't kill you all the way, you know, so yeah, I agree with that. I think, and that's where, again, kind of getting to my own perspective. It's like, I'm, I'm pretty much a free service available to anybody and everybody, you know, it's, yeah, I'm here to sell radio for a living from a company. But, you know, you want 15 minutes of my time to ask me questions, you know, general questions about something that I know something about, I will share with you all day long. And I've joined some of those mentor communities and things like that. And it's like, you know, I don't, it does, it does very little for me, frankly. But hey, you know, if I'm helping somebody answer some questions here and there, most people know how to reach me. It's not that hard. And, and, you know, and you can just ask a bunch of people, you know, you ask people, well, who helped you, you know, whatever, you know, there's a lot of that, a lot of that that's going on. You guys are getting tagged every day in different posts, I'm getting tagged in every day in different posts. And I think that's the magic of a lot of that's like the good side of social networking, right? Is that we can say, Hey, I know somebody, you know, I'm not very much help to you, but I know somebody who could be helpful to you. And this is the person. And, you know, when you see three or four people all kind of directing everybody to one person, that's kind of a, a show to say, well, that person, probably the person I need to be talking to. Yeah, a lot of really good information, a lot of insanity too. So that's my, my old man sort of a dad joke, like, especially things like West Hawk is like, yeah, a lot of good information there, but the S and R is kind of poor sometimes. So, and then if they don't understand that joke, then I'm like, Oh, you got a lot more reading to do. So anyways, figuring it out though. So back to the little less, the big idea perspective and a little more to the practical perspective is so the newest that's out there that's like, All right, cool. You know, my five gig back halls, they worked really well for what I was doing, but I need to take that next step, right? And, you know, okay, all I hear is license, I just see dollar signs, I'm freaking out. So what do you, what would you say to the new wisp out there that's thinking about it or doesn't know like what to do or what are the next steps, you know, what are the things I have to consider with like, I don't know, coordination, channel planning and stuff, just kind of walk through what does it mean to buy a license link beyond just buying a couple of boxes of widgets and putting them in the sky? Yeah, that's, that's great. They're unfortunately, there's a lot of, there's a lot of it is complicated and it can be a little bit scary. But you know, if we were to say every country has different regulations in every country has different bands that are available. So, you know, I'm a USA, North America guys. So, you know, excuse me, if I start using, you know, USA numbers here, but the everything that I'm talking about applies everywhere else, it's just the numbers might be slightly different. We have a situation here in the United States where if you look at your licensed bands and licensed microwave bands, there's really only two bands that you want to focus on. That's 11 gigahertz and 18 gigahertz. And the reason those two bands have become the ones you want to focus on is because they have the widest channel bandwidths available from the SCC. Point number one, learn that. Now, what are the bands available to me? There's other bands out there. It's six gigahertz lower, six gigahertz upper, 23 gigs. Some people have access to 13 gigs. There's some other bands out there. But guess what? All those bands have narrower channels. So, all those bands are going to deliver less capacity. Who wants less capacity? You know, it's going to be basically the same amount of hardware, the same amount of cost, same amount of infrastructure. Everybody wants more capacity. So, you want capacity, 11 gigahertz and 18 gigahertz place to go. That's point number one. The channel bandwidths are 80 megahertz wide, by the way. And there's different vernacular out there and some that's important to touch on is that understanding what you're hearing and the definition of what you're hearing is really important. Somebody says, you know, this is the capacity you're getting. What do you mean by capacity? That's a very basic number, very basic thing. But everybody has different definitions of capacity. There's full duplex capacity. There's aggregate capacity. There's half duplex capacity. You have to then understand the difference between things like time division duplex and frequency division duplex. And what does that mean to me? I'm not going to get into all those details, but most of the microwave radio, all but one, frankly, are on frequency division duplex. The one that isn't is the Mamosa B11. Mamosa B11 has a mode that operates in TPD. Understanding what that means to you and why that's important is good. We won't get into the details. I'll teach you if you need to know more. But ultimately then, you know, in the United States, we have this really cool thing, very helpful thing called frequency coordination. Other countries don't necessarily benefit from what we benefit here where we've got a fairly organized spectrum that's intended to basically allow you to operate without interfering with others and nobody interfering with you. It's not perfect. Some people might be running rogue systems. Sometimes it's just weird physics that cause things to interfere with one another that nobody could have predicted. But it's pretty darn good. I mean, literally, well more than 99% of the things that are designed out there are working interference-free, so that's great. And the other thing that's important to understand there is in frequency coordination, who you hire to do that business matters. Some companies have better technology than others as far as determining what frequency channels can do what. And so that's another lesson that people can learn along the way to say, hey, this coordinator told me there's no channels available, or this coordinator told me that I can get the channels, but I have to turn down my power or something like that, or I have to use narrower channels and I'm not going to get the capacity I wanted. All those things happen. And sometimes they happen even when you put the best coordinator in it because you're in a really crowded area and you just can't get the spectrum. But sometimes a better coordinator can find you a channel that somebody else couldn't find because they just have better technology. They have better computing power. They do different things to figure that out. So frequency coordination is a really important part of it here in the US and any other country that has frequency coordination. And then I think, let's see, what was the other thing I wanted to try to cover? These definitions things are important again. When you say capacity, it's important to ask somebody, does that mean full duplex capacity, like both directions simultaneously? Does that mean aggregate capacity? That's hurdle number one. The hurdle number two is like, what do you mean by capacity? How is that being measured? Because somebody, company A measures it one way, company B measures it another, they might actually, the one with a higher number might actually be lower than the other one. For real. So asking the questions of like, how is that capacity measured? What am I really going to get? Like if I run a speed test or if I run a true layer one capacity test in both directions simultaneously, what am I really going to get out of this technology? I think what I'm getting to is, unfortunately, a lot of marketing has come into, it's been in the industry for a long, long time actually, you know, 11 megabits Wi-Fi was never 11. Never was, you know, it's just some number and then 54 megabits came out. It's like, 54 didn't mean anything either. It just meant faster, but how fast it really was. And unfortunately, I wouldn't say that people lie, but they're using some number, they're tagging something to it, there might be an asterisk or a footnote somewhere, or you can determine what that number really means. But you have to do your research. You have to ask the questions. I don't think anybody's going to lie to you if you ask them. Does that mean both directions simultaneously? Is that an aggregate number? How is that number measured? Those are good questions to ask because otherwise you're not comparing apples to oranges. I think the other thing, this is another really hot topic and it has to do with propagation and prediction. And I've been an RF guy, so actually most of the science work that I've ever done in my whole career has to do with propagation and prediction. And I built calculators and link planners and all these kinds of things. And it's a tough science and there's different, there's different mechanisms to estimate how RF signal is going to work over time given air pressure and rainfall and other things of temperature variation when you're going over water, all these different factors. And different manufacturers may hone in on a particular science to apply to a prediction of how something's going to work. Some manufacturers may apply a science that makes the numbers look as good as possible. And other manufacturers might apply a science that make them look as conservative as possible. And so once again, you're left with two different, maybe two different manufacturers showing you something, one looks better than the other on paper. But if you're not paying close attention and not asking questions like, well, I wasn't comparing apples and apples. And that to me, this is really, it's kind of a little bit sad, I'm going to shed a tear, but all these things I've said is that you have to ask the, you have to be knowledgeable enough to ask the questions to know whether or not what you're comparing is a real comparison. I'm sure you guys see this on your set too. That's the magic of gain in marketing for us is basically what all that comes down to. And it's funny that you mentioned that because we see it a lot also with speeds and people listing the phi rates versus what you actually get. And that's very misleading. And I think people do that just because of the reason you said they do right or why they would is to make it look faster to the unknowing uneducated customer. They want to choose that over somebody else. And you know, well, it is what it is. But we try to educate them. Yeah, I mean, it's for manufacturers, excuse me, for manufacturers, I think, you know, you're either playing a long game or you're playing the shirking, you know. And you know, from my perspective, it's like, why would you actively mislead your client into what some solution is going to give you to get a sale to only know that on the back end of that sale, the customer is going to be dissatisfied. And then he's going to tell all of his friends that he's dissatisfied. It's like, you know, it's a losing game. I'm not saying lie because I don't actually think anybody lies. No, I mean, five rates are five rates, right? So there's no lying. Yeah, it's real. It doesn't matter. You know, it's just like when I said somebody comes back and says, well, how far can this go? I said, well, I don't go 100 miles. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, we're done, right? You're going to buy my stuff because it goes 100 miles, man. You know, no, that's not the end of the conversation. I think, I think Josh had said something like, you know, it depends. And, and as an engineer, you know, that's like my, that's my like, my line is like my line in life because it's real. It's like almost every single question could be answered by the answer. It depends. And we have a new hashtag, Ken. Yeah, there you go. Hashtag depends. Yeah, let's, let's, yeah, let's not get there yet. I'm not quite that. Not that. That has dual meaning, right? Okay, sorry. I'm headed. I'm headed there. You know, we'll put it, we'll put hashtag it depends. That's so much better. That's so much better. But I, yeah, I think that, you know, you have, like, like I said a little bit about the interaction and with stock is you have to ask more questions. You have to give more information. And unfortunately, I think, you know, you either learn the hardware or, or, you know, a different way, but learning these things that we talked about, like, well, what does, what does that mean? You know, is it, is a full duplex as an aggregate capacity? How is capacity being measured? How are you doing this prediction? What technology are you using? Is that a conservative prediction or an aggressive prediction? How did you come up with those numbers? I don't, you know, I don't understand it. That's good. You know, don't just take somebody's word for it and say, okay, well, this guy says that this thing's gonna work. Like, well, you know, we, we put out these really complex charts of how we think a radio is kind of operate over time. And a lot of people just say, well, you know, if you guys say it's good, it's good enough for me. Well, that's, that's great. If you trust me, if I, if I built up that trust, that's wonderful. But that, that rule doesn't apply to everybody. You shouldn't, everybody that gives you something to say, it's gonna work the way I tell you, it's gonna work. They might not even know. And I think this, one of the things leaking into this conversation is just the impact of, it's hard for me to describe to somebody to say, hey, listen, you know, when you look on your weather app on your phone, and it says it's gonna, it's got a 70% chance of rain tomorrow. What does that mean? You know, it's maybe even in your town, you know, it's like you pulled up your town out of Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz says 70% chance of rain tomorrow. What does that mean? It means that there's a 70% chance of rain, it's gonna rain somewhere in my town tomorrow. You know, how hard, how long is it gonna affect me at my house? I don't know those answers based on that little metric. And, and I use that analogy important because weather is so impactful to wireless. And as we start going up in the higher frequencies, even more so, the band is very affected by rain 60 gig or two more affected by rain. And as we get into higher frequency bands, we haven't talked about it yet, but there will be technology above 80 gigahertz that becomes commercialized. This rainfall and distance and reliability thing is going to become really, really important. And how does somebody accurately predict how that knowledge is going to work? The answer is they will not. Because you can't predict the weather. I mean, we've got thousands and thousands of scientists all over the world trying to predict the weather. And a fraction of those scientists are trying to take how does that weather affect my knowledge? And if I know I can watch the five o'clock news and watch the weather report and watch it be wrong more than it's right, then you can only imagine the fraction of scientists that are trying to take that information applied to the physics of wireless or even wrong or, you know. Yeah, I mean, that's the problem with so many of these historical models is like, that's great. But, you know, 100-year average, you know, yeah, at ball parks, and you've got a central sort of comparison point from system A to system B, but doesn't necessarily mean that's the truth, especially as wacky as the weather's been getting over the last several years. So it's... Well, yeah, I mean, one of these parts of this conversation is a little bit about what you might call climate change, you know. In my lifetime, I think whether it's become more severe or whatever that means, the other... So, yeah, I think the 100-year model things are just not what they could be. The other part of that is just simply like microclimates and just weirdness, you know. It's like, yeah, in my town, you know, we're using some pen and a map to say, well, you know, average rainfall is X millimeters an hour for this duration of time. But that seemed like in your county or maybe even your state, you know, it's over some very broad region. And one link in your network that's adjacent to another link in your network might experience something completely different. And they're adjacent to one another because one happens to be going like with the valley and the other one's going across the valley or something like that. And it's like, you know, that is not easy to figure out. And so, you know, I think ultimately what we see is we can do all these predictions, but there are only predictions. And that's a very hard part of the discussion that I might have with the customer to say, hey, this is the best prediction we can make. And we've actually been a little bit conservative about it. But guess what? Your mileage is still going to vary. You know, your uptime is still going to vary. And nothing says anything better than experience, says it. You know, ultimately, you're going to have to use this technology, kind of find out what it does in your area and take that knowledge and use it to adjust your expectations as you go forward. That part of it is actually a really difficult part of the conversation. Because I consider myself, you know, pretty high science when it comes to our propagation. And yet I look at this as like a big mystery. I mean, we do the best we can with the tools that we have in front of us. But I frankly think that's not going to get any better. It's only going to get harder. Reminds me of the very first 11 gig link I ever touched or did as 15 years ago and way too far. I mean, I forget how far it was, but it was obnoxiously far. You know, 256-kilomer radio kind of old school, but it was oriented north, the northeast, like exactly where the storm bands would come in that exact same way. So when you look on paper and the calculations are like, oh, you got five nines, it's great. But when that one band would come through, it would be 10 miles of just nothing but that one band for 30 minutes as I push through. So, you know, it just sits there in the entire band. So if that link would have been shifted a little bit like this, it would have run fine, but it didn't. So it's just, you see some of that weirdness. But yeah, the computer, I think maybe some things will get a little better. Certainly things like LiDAR data has helped us with things like minus site analysis and maybe even, you know, I think we'll even get better at determining how things propagate, especially like in your area of the expertise is things like how things propagate non-minus site. I don't deal with a lot of non-minus site stuff. I think that part of the science actually has come quite a long ways, even just in the last, you know, five years or so. And there's some great, you know, great emerging tools that will help you determine, you know, tree clutter and propagation and certain frequencies. But when we get to backhaul, you know, none of that edge stuff is going to matter if you can't get that, if you can't get the connection to that. So nobody asks you if you can do a backhaul through how many trees you can go through like we get all the time, right? Oh, I don't know. I'm sure he gets a few. Zero. Yeah. I just have this one building in the way. Is that okay, Ken? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, the in my world where I'm living today at Aviat, no, basically just don't allow you. We try to not let you have anything that is in full clearance, you know. And I spent a few days with a customer like a couple weeks ago, he didn't know, no disparity to this guy. He just had never figured out like, well, how do I figure out whether or not I have plans? Well, that's a great question. And the answer is hard. You know, we're, we're going to like look on Google Maps, we're going to pull up all the different tools that you have available to your desktop. You've got my tool, you've got Cambium's tool, you've got the ISP toolbox thing that Facebook put out, you've got CN who knows, you've got all these tower coverage, I'm not trying to leave brand name on, and you've got all these different things. I said, let's look at them all. We shouldn't leave anything out that's available to our fingertips because we can do this in our desktops in about half an hour. We could look at five or six different tools that tell us what they think it looks like versus getting in the truck, driving out there and trying to figure it out by hand, which we might still end up doing. But when we do that, we'll be smarter about it, right? We'll know exactly where to go, exactly where to look for and figure it out from there. And we walked all the way down that path. It's like, okay, we all think that this path is clear. All right, let's hope it is, you know. Last check might be let's go climb the tower with a pair of binoculars, you know, or let's go drive to these three points on your path and figure out whether those trees are really there or not and how tall they are. And how do you measure the height of a tree is the next question. Okay, I could teach you how to do that too. You know, I was like, or these are things that some people don't know, and that's okay. You got to ask the question and find out from somebody who does know and walk down that path. That was an obvious pun there, walk down that path. We got it. So walk, walk, walk. I'll be here all day, guys. Oh, man. But yeah, I mean, what you say is so true, like there's been so many hours that I've spent trolling Google Maps and being like, all right, I'm at this high point. Oh, thank God, there's a street view. So I could drop it over this picture is from 2003. So is there anything here? The first time I got my my new whiz bang Nikon forestry meter, so I could get back and pop the heights within a few feet of accuracy. I'm like, this thing's amazing. At first time, it paid for itself like the first week I had it because the engineers like, yeah, we got we got line of sight. We're good. You know, the the model says 50 foot trees here and I went out there and they were like 120 and I'm like, nope, this is not going to work, bro. So but it's and I mean, it sucks because you almost have to kind of burn yourself, you know, and especially on the two or three miles is pretty easy to figure out if you've got, you know, visual or radio line of sight, keeping in mind that from all zones of things so on and so forth. But you know, there's, there's just so much. So I think, you know, I've built a lot of links, I've sold a lot of links, I've helped people do a lot of comparisons. And I would definitely say the the physical mapping of that link, right? That's where people get blown up a lot. They're like, Oh, it clears this ridge, right? Well, this ridge is 30 year old shuttle data, right? And there's buildings here, trees. So you got to understand a full path analysis there. You've got to understand what the metrics and reliability numbers and throughputs that reports putting out as well. And you got to fully understand the bomb, because there's so many times where, you know, an uneducated person, you know, they're used to buying stuff without my loot, not a lot of nuance, right? So hey, this truck has this much horsepower and carry this much stuff. Okay, great. So I'm gonna buy this truck. Does what it does. But, you know, there's just so much nuance in a lot of these links and where they'll they'll be, I want to 10 miles. I don't want to gig. Okay. And you know, some sales guy out there somewhere, oh, here's a bomb with two foot dishes, no power supplies, no cable, it's just radios and dishes. And then you look at a proper engineering solution that includes your cabling, your power supplies, your surge protectors, your optics, your SFP modules that are temperated and not Alibaba specials, like all these things are like, Hey, this is, well, it's got four foot dishes or six foot dishes. And this is why my price is three or four times as much. And they don't understand what the nuance is. So, you know, there's a lot of parts, but if you can understand that physical path, if you can understand what the path report predictions put out and you understand what everything in that bomb is, then you're going to be in a way better state than just kind of blindly leaving, you know, and even we say it with our stuff too. Yeah, that's really, those are really good points, Caleb, because I think it was just yesterday or doing that for somebody where I outlined the materials and I did a little photoshopping, if you will, you know, to the bomb to point at each item and say, this is what, you know, this is what this is. And, you know, maybe you're going to choose between choice A and choice B, surge protection, is it going to be outdoor mounted or indoor mounted? You know, if you need one, you need two. If you buy this one, well, you're going to ground it this way. But if you're going to buy this one, it's going to be grounded differently. And those are, you know, those are important perspectives. And yeah, you know, it's like, you could, you could come to work with me tomorrow, Caleb, if things are bad at our filaments, because, you know, we've got. Well, Ken, it was great having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time. Yeah, no, but when you said it's so funny, because I could literally pull up right now and show you these little templates that we drop into our quotes and our, and our emails that we send to customers to say, you know, here's your radios, antennas, the capacity, keying, if that applies or something like that. But guess what, doesn't include sales tax, doesn't include freight, doesn't include fibers, DC cables, SFPs, you know, all these things. And it's not like I'm trying to mislead somebody, because that's in bold print. And it's right here. And it's all, you know, pasted straight into your email every time I send a quote, until you answer these questions, you know, I don't know how long your fibers need to be. I don't know how long your DC cables need to be. I don't, if I don't know where you live and I don't have an account for you, I can't tell you how much freight it's going to be. You know, I don't know how much your sales tax rate is going to be. So, you know, we, we have everything you said, yeah, I mean, we could be talking about a, you know, somebody says, well, how much does the link like that cost? And of course, I'm all I say it depends, you know, no, it's, it's, you know, radios and antennas, I can give you that number. I know exactly what that price is. But it's all this extra stuff. I don't know, you know, so I'm going to have to ask you a bunch of questions. You know, I can give somebody a range to say, you know, most customers end up spending about this amount of money. But, you know, until you get into the specifics of what you exactly need, you know, we don't, we don't really know what it's going to cost. But that's been the beauty we're working on. Like we have a, so we do, we deal direct with our customers. I think we're the only backhaul company that does. And we have an online store, which is not all that fancy. It's really more of a place to just check off things you want to buy. And that's part of the reason I've got some help on my side, because we basically do that for our customers and set up a shopping cart for them and say, okay, this is everything you're going to need after we've asked them a bunch of questions. But we're moving towards trying to get those tools to help guide you, right? And say, okay, you made it, you've made one decision. Now let's talk about your fireworks, you know, how many of them, you know, this is why you'd want at least one. This is why you might consider having two, how to figure out how long they need to be. How about SFPs? You need one of the top and the bottom. The top one needs to be industrial temperature, temperature all those things you just said. And trying to move more to a DIY experience, because it's great for us, it's great for our customers, they can just go do whatever they need to do. They don't need a lot of help for us, because I don't have to hire extra people and make my gear more expensive because I'm spending money on people and try to drive that to where all those decisions can be made and you understand what it is you're you're putting together if you're putting together materials. Yeah, that bomb is just so important. And don't y'all don't estimate what, oh, I need a 150 feet of fiber. Yeah, that's plenty of the towers 100 feet. So, you know, you don't need any loop or any bends or radius. And then you, you get your fiber and it's 10 foot too short. And you're like, you realize this shit doesn't stretch, right? So I think it's that understanding how big a six foot dish really is or God forbid me, you know, and they're like, Hey, man, uh, yeah, uh, I don't think this is going to fit on my tower. I'm like, well, I've seen it 125 feet. It looks like a dandy line. It's like this. And it's just I'm like, I'm like, how tall is this 125? Yeah, I'm going 150 feet that way. So yeah, it's we've seen. Yeah, you know, in this size, actually, I mean, I'm glad you brought up the topic of dishes. Number one, yeah, if you've never stood next to a six foot dish, you know, no idea I'll be there. I mean, most of us are probably in the vicinity of six feet tall. You stand next to a six foot dish and they're huge. Yeah, they're not built. They're not built like a little simple like, Oh, a two foot dish is this and a six foot is this but bigger. I'm like, no, it gets, it gets a little heavier or your dish cost is now, you know, it's not a direct direct cost correlation. It's now four times six times expensive. Wow, great, too. Yeah, cost more than radio. Yeah, six foot dish is two times the price of a four foot dish. A four foot dish is just a little bit more money than three foot dish. So yeah, it gets and then you paying for getting on a truck and driving it to, you know, from our Texas warehouse to wherever you happen to be, that's going to be a ton of money and you can't fit in the back of your truck. So that's the other problem. Oh, you can. You just gotta be a little clever. So there's, there's been some where I'm like, no, all right, we're not going to pass any DOT. Let's just get this done. So in the dark of night. Yeah, it's banjo time boys. So yeah, but you know, antenna size is another topic because that's another thing I've been trying to educate. When the low cost licensed radios came out, one of the popular things to do is say, well, you know, we're, we're going to license. Okay, we're going to spend more money than we've ever spent on a backhaul. And lo and behold, you're running, you know, these two foot dishes or two and a half foot dishes on 11 gigahertz, which is fine. I'll get you some distance and get you some capacity. But guess what? That falls into something called category B. And nobody's ever done any lessons on category B. I've got a nice video on that, but I was a little club there. But the idea is category B, I actually had this happen at my local ISP of all companies. They had a six gig length they had to put up from one point to another. They had a zoning restriction at the building on one end of that link and they had to put a three foot dish on it. Three foot dish, by the way, minimum size for six gigahertz, six foot dish is minimum category A size for six gigahertz. So they were operating in category B on that end of the link. They had that link running for less than a year and they got a letter from the coordinator of the FCC that said they had to either get off those frequencies or increase the dish to six foot. And they ended up, we got lucky, we found another channel pair for them. So they got to move to a different channel pair. That cost them money. They had to go through recordination. They had to buy new radios because the radios that they had didn't operate in the channel pair that came in. The high and low? Yeah. Yeah. So they had to buy a whole new pair of radios and pay for FCC coordination all over again, only to be exposed in the same way that they were exposed in step one. It still could get another letter from the FCC a year from now, five years from now and say, guess what, I've got to do it again. Now, they did it for a reason. They kind of had no other choice. This is the only way they could build this link. But for these customers that are using two to two and a half foot category B dishes on 11 gigahertz lengths, you could have used a three foot dish and gotten yourself in category A and never had to worry about it again. And that's something that nine out of 10 of my customers have never heard before. And so they've got 25 links in their network of AF 11 or B 11 or something like that with less than three foot dishes on them. Every one of those links is an opportunity for the FCC to come to them one day and say, guess what, you're going to have to turn that thing off, change channels or upgrade your dishes. And that could be a painful day. And I think my prediction is I've seen five times as many cases of that in the last three years. And I saw in the first 35 years of my career, I'm going to see 10 times more cases in the next year and probably 20 times more cases the year after that. The suggestion is real. And so one of the pieces of advice I'm giving people who are starting off with the lower end gear is at least try to get yourself in your category A dish. Or even for my gear, I got people who run them at two foot and they say, hey, that looks good. And I say, yeah, it does look good. But hey, if you've got a four to three foot dish, let's get you into that because it'll keep you from ever having to come back and re-licensing it. And it's not always practical. I mean, I get that. They say, hey, well, we just can't do that. This tower is not sturdy enough or whatever reason it might be. But you should know, and that's the point, right? At least understand you had a choice to make. You might have had some conditions that force you to make a choice one way or the other. But at least you're now knowledgeable about the fact that this is the ramification of the choice that you've made. And I don't think anybody, I don't know, maybe other people are talking about those kinds of things to their customers. But I feel like I might be the only one talking to customers about that aspect of their license radios. And it's not about me selling a three foot dish or a two foot dish. I don't care. I want you to, you know, I want you to not be surprised next year when somebody comes knocking on your door and saying, guess what? I don't know all that money you spent. Yeah. Well, you know, too bad. Yeah. I think that foot knows on a lot of coordination sheets you get. And I think a lot of people are like, me, okay, cool. Like it's never happened to me. You know, I've never had a deal. There's nobody out here. Yeah, there's nobody out here. Yeah, run into that. I run into that dude with six kids. We have, you know, that's another area where like, we have an online tool that does your path planning or, you know, you can do your path planning, but we have a feature in there where you can basically say, show me all the 11 gigahertz lengths within 20 miles of this pen. And boom, they all light up. And some people get freaked out because they see like 300 lengths in the neighborhood and they go, Oh man, this is crazy. I'm never going to get an 11 gigahertz channel. That's not the point. You know, the point is to understand, once you understand the geometry links, you can start to say, well, you look at it carefully and go, this is not going to look too bad because I got nobody coming into my face. I got nobody coming into the backside of my antenna. My, you know, my path is, is linearly pretty well aligned because most of your interference is going to come from the front or come from the back. And if you can see that, and then you start looking at channels, that's what the SCC coordinators are all about. I mean, you don't have to do any of that work. But in about, you know, 10 seconds to 15 seconds, you can get an instant idea of how difficult something's going to be. And it's not a bad idea. Why not spend the next 15 seconds to say, Hey, what does my environment look like? The other really thing about that is you can light that up and say, Hey, who's got links in my area? Where are the towers? You know, I mean, there's all these, all these links are usually on tower truth top. So you can sort of figure out where people are building relays. And that might help you find, you know, partners or powers or other other things to work with. Yeah, visual tool, I get it so handy because, you know, you're only get 10,000 PCN notices and no one ever reads those, right? Or you're supposed to or like lay inside and be like, whatever. So there's a couple of visual tools out there now. You guys, my most has got a real good one. And there's some others out there that are good, good for visualization. So and I think, you know, we talk about six gig a lot because that's in our space, that's what the big, one of the big next things is, you know, it's always some big thing coming up. But but you know, six gig is really for the multi point perspective, folks are really excited. But you know, there is a consideration. There are a lot of existing six gig links out there. And how's that really going to affect the the AFS and stuff? So I mean, the Emmys were the inside on that side of things like. Yeah, that's that's another great question. Caleb, I'm glad you brought it up. It's, it's tricky. So let's start with some fundamentals. Before anybody in the whisper world ever really heard about, you know, six gig in the way that we're talking about today, they may or may not have ever heard about six gig licensed. And there's a six gig license ban. If I get it right, I think it's something like roughly 5.9 something to 6.4 something. And this has been a very, very popular frequency ban for licensed microwave operators. And number one, because six gig propagates very, very well, so you can get a long distance. The other another thing that happened is way back in the late 90s, there was a band around 1.9 to 2.1 gig that the operators used to also operate in. And then got kicked out of the band so that something called PCS or what we now call cellular, you know, could use those frequency bands. So almost everybody that had a two gig or Hertz radio had to get moved. And most of them moved to six gig because it was the only band that could really do the distance. So six gig got really congested. And it's hard to get six gig licenses in most places, frankly, these days. Another downside to six gig is that it has a narrower channel, 60 megahertz wide maximum channel compared to 11 or 18 that have 80 megahertz channels. So again, you get less capacity than that. But there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of six gig licensed radios up and running. And most of them are being used for public safety, critical infrastructure for municipalities like electrical, oil, gas, and cellular service. You know, that's probably the lion's share of those three categories, probably the lion's share of almost all the six gig licensed radios. I've sold a bunch of six gig radios to waste, too. So, you know, that that's that's out there and available to you. What the SCZ is trying to do is figuring out how to frequency share. And most of the bands that everybody operates is some sort of sharing. If people have all heard about BFS channels of 5.4 gigahertz, that exists because you're sharing that spectrum with some satellite uplink technology that operates in that band. And you're trying to make sure that you don't cause interference into those those systems, which are much more critical. And that's the same idea here in six gigahertz. The the thing about six gigahertz, he's going to be I'm excited about six gigahertz on one hand and say, Hey, this is great, a whole bunch of new spectrum for the whisk, they can deliver a whole bunch of capacities for the green fields like a new five, right? You know, sort of like that, right? There's a white band clear spectrum, go out and run some networks and hook up a bunch of people. The the risky part of this is that we don't know yet. And I think it'll take us some time to figure out whether or not the six gig on license stuff might end up actually interfering with the six gig license stuff. And the FCC works hard on trying to get the regulations right for power and where you can put things. And they're going to have these reporting things a lot like CBRS to try to figure out, you know, can you use this channel at this location with this power with this antenna? And will it not interfere with an existing six gig license radio? So a lot of science is being applied, try to make sure that interference never happens. And it won't be perfect. So, you know, there'll probably be some cases where that that doesn't work out. I think the long, the long goal of it, though, is that I look at it as like, there's no way back, right? It's not like they're going to release six gig and say, Okay, go forward, make this all happen. Oh, we've got interference in the six gig license radio. That's what we're going to kick all the six gig license radios out. No, that's not going to happen. What's more likely to happen is that they'll have to make some adjustments to the usage of the six gig on license somehow, you know, maybe lower powers, or they're going to change the way that they calculate interference for, you know, to determine whether or not you can use that channel at that location with that antenna pointed in that direction, you know, sort of refine the science so that we continue to reduce the possibility that interference is going to happen in the license links. So, I'm a pragmatist there, you know, I'm looking at it and saying it'll work out. It kind of has to, right? Because as soon as a bunch of six gig on license gear gets out there, it's not like the SEC is going to be able to say, Okay, you know, shut it all down. We made a mistake. They don't want that number one, and it probably wouldn't really work, you know, so there will have to be much like DFS. We had problems with DFS. If anybody remembers like the Puerto Rico incident, I mean, this was very real, where one vendor's gear was not receiving the interference information properly, or the rules weren't quite tight enough, that it actually was causing interference into something it shouldn't have been causing interference into you. It was nobody's fault. It was really just a matter of the fact that the laws or the regulations had to get more precise, and some things had to change in order for it to make, to work in a cooperative way. And so I think that we'll see that evolution, you know, in the six gig band, you know, as it starts to roll out and as problems maybe pop up here and there. But in the meantime, I mean, I have no problems with, you know, somebody needs a six gig license link. Yeah, let's go. You know, if that's the right band for you and the right band for your link, there's no stopping you from doing that. I don't think there's any concern about it whatsoever. And I'm much more excited about the six gig opportunity than scared by it. I'm actually not scared by it at all. I said, I think it'll just work out. It will have to work out. People will have to figure out how to adjust the expectations of the band to make it work. Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting to see for sure, for sure. So all right. All right. So now time for everyone's favorite conversation in the last two years. COVID supply chain into the world, I don't know, whatever's burning down this week. So, you know, it's definitely been challenging. I think we've talked about it a number of times on the podcast. How has affected us? How has affected other manufacturers and stuff? So, you know, I don't think there's a lot of new ground here, but you guys, you know, you've got some advantages versus some other outfits out there, you know, from being base here in the U.S., which you've got going on in Texas. So if you can give us the elevator pitch of kind of what you guys have seen from all this, how you sort of pivoted and, you know, where it's gone? Yeah, no RF elements podcast would be complete without a discussion of the pandemic. I think, yeah, I know. Vett and Tasa has complained about 4096 qualms. So you mentioned that earlier, and I'm like, sweet, I can go get a snack while I hear this rant for the 17th time. Stop my rant. Stop my rant. Snack time! But we moved on from it, so. For clarification, we're talking about 4096 qualms at the edge, not in the back home, because it's pretty reliable in the back home. On the COVID side of things, it's been interesting, obviously, you know, one time. Number one, I mean, from a demand standpoint for WISP and internet in general, I mean, you know, I don't want to make like the pandemic was wonderful, but, you know, the pandemic was pretty good for business. Everybody had to start working from home. All the kids had to start learning from home. It's like, yeah, we need bandwidth. I think it's helped accelerate the WISP business overall, which has been really impactful. Supply change has been a real challenge. I think that we had our hand in a few areas, and we are a US-based company, headquarters and a factory in Texas. We also manufacture some stuff overseas, so I don't want to come off as being like everything in some that way. But just I think probably the key thing is being in control of our own technology. We design and build our own radios. And so like one key thing that's happened along the way is there was a particular component in our PoE circuit that just suddenly it's like we can't get this component anymore. And we had a few thousand of them or however many we add, but that's like we're not sure when we're ever going to see another one again. So we did a very quick pivot. We had literally every single radio we built, we built an entire mirror product line. So we doubled our product line with all new part numbers, so the new suffixes on the part numbers. Our radios had no longer supported PoE. And we redesigned the circuit and basically kicked the PoE out of it and some labels on the radios. And it's like that sounds real simple, but it's not. It's like, you know, 250 new products. But we did that quickly, like within a month. Because most of our customers don't use PoE. I've got an entire video on why not to use PoE. So heck, you know, it's like, you know, so most of my customers don't need that feature. That feature happens to be there. We could basically continue to supply to 95%, 98% of our customers, non PoE radios, and they wouldn't know the difference. We just had to do this one thing. That was huge. And, you know, it may sound easy, and it actually isn't that hard. But it made a huge difference. It meant we could just continue to ship radios. We just took one feed out that most people didn't need. And boom, we're still shipping radios. I think, and there's three or four examples like that, you know, where we're basically redesigning circuits in the background and having to qualify them. It's a lot of work to change a component. But being able to do that quickly and on the fly, and not having to be just facing these product scarcities and just know we can't ship any radios for now. We never faced that. We would have if we hadn't taken action in many, many terrible cases. But we were, we had a great logistics team. We had a lot of cloud because we're the number one public safety solution. We actually were able to get governmental support to put pressure on some suppliers to put us in the front of the lines. So we were able to actually leverage some of that, which was nice. And I think, you know, that all went overall pretty well. We're still in a shape. I mean, most of my customers are still shocked to say, hey, can I get this? I said, well, you place your order. It's going to ship tomorrow. It's like, that's always the answer. And it has been pretty, pretty much continually. The only time we're out of something is if I haven't predicted something well. If I got, you know, I had a situation in March where I had three different customers by over 100 of the same product in the same spot for a backhaul supplier. 100 links for one customer, customer two, customer three, all the same week, all the same product. I was out. I was out for like four weeks. But I think in other companies, that would have sunk them. It'd be like three months till we can get you. And I was out for four weeks because I didn't have that many in the factory at the time being built, but I had all the parts for. I had parts for another 1500 radius to build. All I had to do was just give the order to the factory, say build more and build them fast because I'm out right now. And so customers didn't wait a long time, you know, for, for us being back into resupply. So that's been good. The harder thing has been, you know, we don't get, we don't get everything from ourselves, obviously, you know, and, you know, antenna is actually point-to-point antennas turned out to be the initial biggest problem for us. Our primary supplier was getting materials from India and some other place or whatever where all the ports shut down and they didn't have any, they didn't have enough stock. And antenna supply just went like the zero. And so, but we were able to, the good thing is we're not all that antenna dependent. We can go multiple places, but we had been relying on certain manufacturers and link times got really bad. So we learned the lesson, you know, probably everybody else did, which is you got to diversify, you have to have multiple vendors, you have to have multiple supply chains from multiple continents from different directions. It's like, you're looking at all those aspects of, you know, having a more robust supply chain and also simply stocking more, you know, and putting more risk in inventory, just to say, you know, we overbuy and overbuild as a result. And I think that's a little bit like the toilet paper crisis, you know, it's like, unfortunately, some of that has a bad effect because you, you know, you're not going to get any more for six months, so you buy three, much if you really need right now, because you don't know when you're going to be able to get more later. We had to do some of that as well, but that's okay, that serves our customers well, you know, it didn't impact us significantly. We have had, you know, probably on the bigger picture is this backend stuff, the cost, you know, cost of freight is out of this world crazy. Cost of some certain materials has gone up significantly, cost of labor has certainly gone up. Inflation is, you know, hitting everybody. I think we've done well to manage that, we have not been impervious to it, and we've had to increase prices here and there. Some people, obviously people don't like that, but it's true. But yeah, overall, I think we've been, you know, I'm proud to say we've been in a really good position, not because there's not like a thousand people running around, you know, playing whack-a-mole, because that's exactly what it is. Like it's this part today, that part next week, and this one and that one. For the most part, I think we're past all that. It's now down to try to manage inflation probably more than anything else. Yeah, it's definitely something everyone sees and everyone's got to deal with. So let's see, what else? New, new news nuggets. I'm going to mess that one up. So press release, you guys just put out, looks like you're buying RedLime. Yeah, that's, so I'll paraphrase by saying the deal is not done, so anybody who's ever done an acquisition knows that there's like this thing they'd call a quiet period in there, you know. Yeah, so any lawyers watching, just be cool, be cool. Yeah, we'll just delay this episode. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting deal, you know, just looking at what's going on. I think, you know, I come from kind of like the wish side of the business. So when I saw the announcement, I'm kind of like, you know, okay, that's seems a little unusual, mostly because they're just really not very prevalent. They used to be, you know, they were kind of like the Kings of Winemax way back when, you know, they had some really interesting things. What's happened there is that they've made a pretty successful pivot in what I might call industrial LTE. I think that's probably the right words to put around it. And they also are doing more business outside of the United States than they are inside the United States. And we're a multinational company, but you know, if you look at the mix of domestic North America versus non-North American business, and theirs, they're actually a little stronger percentage-wise in the international market than we are. So it would appear there's a pretty interesting play there for oil and gas and the maybe the mining industries and things of that nature. And that seems to be the primary emphasis of where they have a decent leadership position and opportunity in those markets. And that plays, well, you know, we are obviously pretty involved in oil and gas back home projects and things like that and more industrial safety, safety markets. So this idea of, you know, ruggedized, hardened hardware for that application has its place. I've been dreaming about, you know, what does that mean for the wisps? I mean, the first thing was, you know, everybody says, you know, make TV white space great again or whatever. Oh, geez. All right, let me get my soapbox out again. 4096, let's talk about TV white space. Yeah, I don't think we really hit that one too much. But yeah, we won't, we won't. Yeah, you know, I frankly don't know. I mean, I'm interested in, I've never really dealt with it much. But I guess my outside looking in influence has been, you know, that spectrum just never could realize what we thought it might have been able to realize at one point in time. I think that's really gear dependent. I haven't seen anything. This is, oh, yeah, this spectrum is valuable. And that means that there could be some, you know, there could be some pretty unique applications where that spectrum is valuable. But I frankly don't even know, you know, what Red Line is doing in that space anymore, if they're doing it anymore. But, you know, the interesting thing about that company is, you know, they've been around for a long time. They've hung in there, you know, and that's, that's, there's something to be said. I've worked for a handful of brands. Who do we name already? You know, Mr. Moll, Mr. Exalt, Proximino that, you know, they're not, they're not what they used to be. But these folks have done pretty well to hang around in the industry and find a place where they succeed. Yeah, I've sold it. I've sold a ton of A&ADIs back in the day. Yeah, you know, those are the thing, you know. We talk about those legacy points. You know, there were products we talked about, Reedscom and, you know, the Western Wall stuff and, you know, the Orinoco things. And, you know, it's like, these were really important, you know, products to launch this industry. And I think Red Line has a place in that history and that history lesson. So we'll see what happens. I think, I think probably the underwhelming answer for the audience that might listen to this is, you know, it is a whiz play. You know, if there's something there, that would be a future thing. Maybe there's some engineers there that have, you know, great ideas about technology and maybe they haven't had the funding or the backing that they need to, you know, really develop. That'd be really super cool. But, you know, it's this private LTE for industrial applications that's the cornerstone of what they're doing. So, you know, and this is all speculation. I mean, if it happens, right? You know, I think the government has to approve it, but, you know, the board of directors have jointly approved it. So it would seem that in the next, I think they're saying two to three months, it would be an official thing. Yeah, I think the whiz talk hot take on that was pretty entertaining. I'm like, yeah, it's all in this press release here and the number like calm down. So I know sometimes it is asking a lot to read past the headline and to read the rest of the article because I mean, I know it's tough. It was, it was like 15 lines long. So it's pretty, pretty deep. But anyway, it's a lot of reading for some of us. Exactly. So and I guess, I mean, we could probably sit here and talk for a really long time. But I guess we should probably think about tail ending this a little bit. So we talked earlier about, you know, what should she knew with us that are learning what license links are, what should they consider understanding your path calyx and your your bombs and stuff like that. I don't know if I'd be kind of fun to kind of in this talking about what what they should not do. Like, I don't know, dumb tales from the field or something. It's always kind of a fun time. Like my dandelion example is what I was thinking of when I was jotting down my notes, you know, giant dishes on small towers like bad news or oh geez, you'll get out there to a site and there's there's not a single part of this tower or the mountainous plumb, right? It's all just cocked over a few degrees. And then you're starting a path and instead of path in your path and like this is something I'm very preachy about because I've been burned too many times. I'm from a link from a link that won't dial in right and then it's because you're moving it like if you put the right side if you put the right side dish or the right height, you can straighten that tower out. That's that's how slant pole was invented. Exactly. It was leaning like this. But I don't know any any fun sort of like just goofy stuff. You see not sizing out your tower legs like I see that happen all the time. Just just so many of these little things cable. Yeah, you know, I I can tell a lot of fun stories that are just plain weird. But I think, you know, to be helpful to people, probably one of the things that was really interesting to me, some folks on the Wisp talk forum know a guy by the name of Tyler Casey, DM internet up in Northern California. And we did an 80 gay or Hertz link with him. And it wasn't holding up as well as we might have thought. And part of it was structural, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, just the structures weren't all that firm, not his fault necessarily. But it turns out he lives in like the windiest county in our entire state. And he was getting more wind outage than he was getting rain outage. And we're usually all hiked up about rain outage in gigahertz. And that's all we can really look at. We did an experiment with them where we dropped from his two foot dishes, which gave him the performance we were expecting, we dropped his dishes down to one footers. And his link has been significantly better wider beam angle. Yeah, you know, just a wider beam with smaller dishes. Yeah, you know, he might get a little bit more rain out, but he has more wind than he has rain. So we made a, you know, we made a pivot and an adjustment there. And I think that lesson was sort of early on in some of my practical event application here at Albiad. Anyway, and from that point on, I'm, you know, talking to more customers about, you know, the firmness of your, of your tower amounts and, and, you know, where are these things going to go? And, you know, should we consider looking at smaller dishes in some cases, in bigger dishes, because bigger dishes are always better in back all, not, no, no, the answer is not true. I mean, I've always said that probably for 40 years in my career until recently, we've said, no, bigger dishes aren't always better for performance. We have this wind factor, especially with these super narrow beams. And we're talking about quarter degree beam, that's how they said 60 gigahertz is a training ground for eBay. Yeah, I've done 60 gigahertz. I said, yeah, okay. Number one, the bandwidths are wider. Number two, the paths are shorter. So guess what? This is going to be even harder. That's probably the most practical story. It's not as fun as, you know, a lot of stories about like the guy who tried to wall mount his radio and ran a screwdriver, ran a drill through the top of the radio and mounted it to the wall and then sent it back because after wall mountain, it didn't work. That's fun. Not very practical. The other thing that I have a lot of fun with is just trying to figure things out that aren't working. It's like, why is this not working the way that we think it would? Not another local customer who's getting some interference into one of his 11 gigahertz license lengths. And it's odd to see it and we're trying to hunt it down. So I enjoy that aspect of the business because I always learned something. You had cases where we had this nice round glass building to the right hand side of the link or something. It was giving us the awkward reflections in the back of our dishes and nothing we could have ever predicted necessarily. And so the world of RF to me is a little bit like a plumbing apparency or whatever you want to look at. You're always going to see something that you've never seen before and you take some of that knowledge and you learn from it and build on it and your eyes get a little wider and your perspective gets a little bit better on what can go wrong. So while I don't enjoy troubleshooting radios so much, I do enjoy the adventure of learning why something didn't work that we would think should be working fine. So there's plenty of that. I'm sure there's plenty of that ahead. And frankly as we get into, we talked earlier about things got to get a higher frequency, everything's got to get shorter. We're just going to see more of that and hopefully we get some technology that helps us with that. Things like maybe being steering antennas or there's mechanical things that can be done with the antennas to try to keep them aligned. There's electromechanical things that can be done there too. So I think that technology will continue to evolve to address the shortcomings of or the challenges of using these kinds of things as we get there. We have to make them practical. So ultimately I can bolt them to a tower and aim them in the general direction and just sort of walk away. That'd be great. It's never really been the case for backhaul so far. But I think as we see time evolve, that has to get better and better. Cool. Well, I think it's time to wrap this one up. Ken, for those looking for you, in a good way, not a bad way, it sounds a little ominous, but for people who would like to have a pleasant conversation with you, what's the best way to track you down? Where can they find you? That's great. Probably the easiest way is through Facebook Messenger, Wisp Doc. You see me very active there. My email address at avian is ken.ruppel at avianet.com. So it's like avianetworks.com. Yeah, so I'd say through, you know, through Facebook, it's probably the easy way to do it. That email address I just gave you is another great way to get to me. And just about, you know, somebody knows me who you know. So just saying, how do I get ahold of that guy? I have the curse of living on the West Coast, so I'm usually not awake when most everybody else is awake. So I try to keep people from waking me up if I can. Try to keep that in mind a little bit when you're reaching out to me, is phone calls at 4am or usually not answered unless I happen to be awake. But that's a do my best to get back to it. I enjoy being part of the community and, you know, just the opportunity that we talked about it at the front end, just, you know, to kind of be a part of this this movement, you know, that's been going on now for 20 years, more than 20 years, 25 years, I think since I put my first use in that radio up, you know, just having an impact on our communities and just working with the West has just been so rewarding. So I'm looking forward to, you know, helping, helping folks learn more about it and being successful in their business and helping their communities get connected. Cool, cool, man. We definitely appreciate you talking to us here, sharing your experiences. And this has been great. So Tossos, where can people find us? Yes, they can find us everywhere on social media. Definitely Facebook is one of the best places and a lot of the WISP groups like WISP Talk, WISPs, WISP Starter, you name it, WISP, you'll find us there. Instagram is another good place. Of course, email Tossos at RFelements.com or even you, Caleb at RFelements.com. And then, you know, our website RFelements.com, a great place for finding all the information that you need and, you know, reaching out to us via email or phone or what have you. All right, all right, all right. Well, until next time, everybody, we will talk to you all later. So be good. Be good, everybody. Bye.