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Comment by dmurray

2 years ago

I used to work in high-frequency trading. I had several tabs permanently open to the live weather radar feed for regions where we had microwave towers: the NE USA, the South of England, the Alps...

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dmurray

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none_to_remain  2 years ago

I used to be in an adjacent field and we used to joke about when the HFT guys were gonna get working on some neutrino detectors & sources to signal straight through the Earth. You could use them for science on the weekends!

  • gleenn  2 years ago

    Sounds awesome, to be able to send a signal directly through the whole earth from point to point. It also sounds like origin story of X-Men or a new cancer

    • _boffin_  2 years ago

      Reminds me of Hubble and the NRO satellites and how Hubble was an extra that they didn’t need.

seabass-labrax  2 years ago

I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or did your company have towers all to itself?

  • dmurray  2 years ago

    Without going into anything confidential - we had some of our own hardware, but generally rented capacity from firms like [0]. Some towers were custom built for HFT, some were shared with other types of users.

    A famous blog post investigating some of the towers as an outsider, at [1], will be of interest to you.

    If you want to guess where they are, get a globe, find the datacentres where electronic exchanges operate (it's not a secret: Chicago, New Jersey, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Zurich...) and draw the straightest possible lines between pairs of them. Microwaves don't cross the ocean.

    [0] https://www.mckay-brothers.com/

    [1] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-ba...