what are the diadvantages of microwave communication systems?

Question

what are the advantages and disadvatages of microwave communication system

Answer 1

the biggest disadvantage is they are line of sight only

Answer 2

Technically, both radio transmissions and cellular phones are also line of sight communications; but they work, while microwave transmissions linger in the background.

Let's start with the cellular phones. These work on a similar principle as the radio or microwave - they send out an EM wave which carries the information of the call. Since these are basically glorified walkie talkies, you would only be able to call people within the range of the phone. How much would that suck? So, we decided to make towers that pickup and relay the call. Allows us to call anywhere since now our RAZR walkie talkie now only has to get to the nearest tower. So, where once this was basically line of sight, now it's transmittable across the country.

Radio waves, however, may make a better point. If you are near a light right now, hold your hand up to it. How much of the light makes it through the palm of your hand? Not very much, right? That's because that is visible light (I know this is basic, I'm going somewhere, stick with me). Now take a guess how many more radio waves are passing clean through your hand right now? The answer is a whole lot. If you have a radio nearby, scroll through the dial and count how many stations come in. That's how many different sets of radiowaves are passing through you.

The reason is that radiowaves are a less energetic EM wave; it has such a low energy that it barely interacts with matter. This is why you can get radio stations in your car for miles and miles when you are driving out of town.

So, moving on to microwaves, they interact a little more with matter and therefore don't go as far. Where radiowaves will go through buildings and walls and some will make it through, microwaves will just be absorbed.

Therefore, because of the physics and the fact that we aren't going to be building microwave towers anytime soon, they are still line of sight, which is a really big drawback.

Answer 3

Quick deployment and mobility are a major advantage in some situations like disaster recovery. Even if all the wire-line systems are down such as after a hurricane, a satellite microwave system could be deployed relatively quickly to restore some services to the effected areas. Satellite microwave systems also have military applications to troops in the field or ships at sea as the systems can be made very mobile.

A clear disadvantage is that microwave systems are very susceptible to weather outages due to rain. Rain can degrade the system performance drastically to the point where they cannot be used for appreciable periods of time. This is true both of terrestrial and satellite systems. Clearly this isn't a problem with wire-line systems at all.

Others have already mentioned line of sight issues.

Answer 4

Microwaves cannot bend itself as it is a transverse wave. So, in the field of communication it is not so practical to use microwave systems.