Stop the desert, get free power?

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Actually, longer antennas work just fine for high frequencies, just harder to absorb standing wave. Nothing a couple of capicitors wont fix or being resonant to the specific frequency, or maybe even a delta, gamma driven shape

I'm rather fond of multi length arrays. you might even have one on your roof hooked to the tv

I don't think solar panel manufacturers can add trillions of nanoscopic capacitors to their solar cells.

Yes, in ham world you can use long antennas and use harmonics to get it to resonate in more than one frequency at once. My second antenna I built was a ZS6BKW, resonant on 40m, 20m, 17m, 12m, and 10m, and I hope to add a stub to make it resonate on 15 too one of these days. Still, that's kind of irrelevant to solar cells as far as I know.

[Logic]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Cropland is only green for the last [approx.] half of the growing season.

Good point!

So you tune for brown desert sand but then the damn desert goes and turns green!

Even if it's just grazing animals and indigenous grass under the panels the reflected colour is seasonal.
I can't think of one setting where the colour remains constant..?
Painted surfaces; yes, but everyone has a different fav colour.
Damn you for killing my idea!

[Logic]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

Yep. the frequency is what gets you. Highly efficient cells usually have layers that are transparent to other frequencies but absorb and convert one frequency of light to electricity.

And it's not just visible light that has to be taken into account. We also get bombarded with infrared and ultraviolet as well. And no light is just one frequence. Ultraviolet, for an example, is between about 790 terahertz and 30,000 terahertz.

Applying amateur radio logic here, we need a different antenna for each of our 7, 10.1, 14, 18, 21, 24, 28, 50, 144, and 222 MHz frequencies. That's 10 different antennas, and we haven't even included the need for different antennas for other radio frequencies in that same like CB (27MHz), MURS (150MHz), FM radio (88MHz), and TV (54MHz, 174MHz, etc.) So, if you need at least 50 antennas or so in order to pick up 7MHz through 222MHz efficiently, you probably need some 50 layers to convert just ultraviolet light to electricity efficiently.

Yep.
AFAIK the most efficient panels lately, consist of transparent Perovskite on top of std cells, to catch more of the frequencies of light.

The current challenge is increasing the lifespan of Perovskite.