Insights

News, articles & technical insights

Perspectives from the SCOPT team on communication systems engineering, our products and the industry.

SCOPT
SCOPTAug 2026

The Hidden Weakness in Quantum Encryption: Pointing Error in QKD

Quantum key distribution is provably secure in theory — but beam misalignment (pointing error) can push the quantum bit error rate past its threshold and drive the secret key rate to zero. How pointing error degrades QKD, and what designers can do.

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SCOPT
SCOPTAug 2026

How Water Type Sets Your UOWC Range: Absorption, Scattering and Turbulence

Why identical underwater optical wireless (UOWC) hardware closes 40 m in clean ocean but only metres in harbour water — how absorption, scattering and turbulence combine, the blue-green window, SNR budgets by water type, and aperture averaging.

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SCOPT
SCOPTJul 2026

FSO Aerial Link Analysis: Turbulence, Attenuation and Pointing Error for HAPS and UAV Links

How aerial free-space optical links (ground-to-HAPS, UAV) are analysed — combining slant-path turbulence, layered attenuation and platform pointing error into BER, capacity, outage and link-budget predictions.

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SCOPT
SCOPTJun 2026

Underwater Optical Turbulence in UOWC: Why Temperature and Salinity Matter

Underwater optical turbulence explained for engineers: temperature-salinity microstructure, the oceanic spectrum, scintillation and beam wander, and how to model and mitigate it.

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SCOPT
SCOPTJun 2026

Atmospheric Optical Turbulence in FSO Links: Effects, Modelling and Mitigation

How atmospheric turbulence degrades FSO links — scintillation, beam wander, AOA fluctuation — plus the Cn2 parameter, fading models and mitigation like aperture averaging.

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SCOPT
SCOPTJun 2026

Free-Space Optics (FSO) Link Design: A Practical Guide for Engineers

How to design reliable FSO links: link budget, atmospheric attenuation, turbulence and scintillation, and the techniques that deliver carrier-grade availability.

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SCOPT
SCOPTJun 2026

Non-Terrestrial Networks and the Road to 6G: Optical Backhaul, Satellites and UAVs

How NTN extends 5G/6G via satellites, HAPS and UAVs — and why optical inter-satellite and feeder links are key to the capacity an integrated 6G network needs.

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SCOPT
SCOPTJun 2026

Optical Wireless Communication Explained: From VLC to Underwater Links

A clear engineering overview of optical wireless (OWC): VLC/LiFi, FSO, and underwater optical communication (UOWC) — channels, trade-offs, and where each one wins.

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