26 bps at 1.5 m: And what exactly do we expect to carry with this communication channel? If you add horned antennas it becomes a ridiculous design just to gain a few more bytes. If you add antenna arrays then it's no longer cheap. Your transmitter's output power is basically hard limited by Boltzmann constant, so just increasing range means you will have a bad time decoding it. Digital tricks, cryogenics... maybe a few more bytes, but is it enough?

I'm really struggling to see if this can be useful for anything. Dicke radiometer reference is cool, though.