Sorry to all for this long post but I think it important to
set the record straight. I'll try to move it to a web page
and only summarise next time this crap appears.

George


"r9ns" wrote in message
om...
Pioneer Acceleration Implies Light Speed Delay 1 Second
....
Dishman and Markwardt, mistakenly claimed that 1)the approximate
agreement of the results of this procedure with the NASA ephemeris,
and 2)the lack of agreement of these results with the assumption of
some other light speed delay assumption proved the validity of the
conventional light speed delay assumption,

At no time have I ever made such a claim. Sansbury is aware
of this and is simply lying.

But this is a classic
"petitio principi" where the conclusion, here the craft trajectory,
is assumed in the premise.

Again, this is untrue. I have presented a number of proofs
that Sansbury's hypothesis of a limiting propagation time of
the order of 1s is flasified by the Pioneer 10 transponder
data.

The first is simple. In March 1988, the round trip time was
approximatelt 12 hours. This means that when the receiving
site was in contact, the transmitting site was hidden by the
bulk of the Earth. While often the receiving site would also
be transmitting the uplink for the next contact, Markwardt
has confirmed there are many documented instances where the
receiving site was not transmitting.

When Sansbury invented fictious, undocumented transmissions
from the receiving site to account for the failure of his
hypothesis, I pointed out that the longitude of the
originating site could be determined by subtracting the phase
of the diurnal at the receiving site from the total Doppler
shift to ascertain a combination of the propagation delay and
diurnal produce by the transmitting site. To test this, we
used JPL Horizons to calculate the predicted received frequency
under two hypotheses;

1) transmission from the site logged by JPL with the
conventional propagation time, and

2) transmission from the receive site with instantaneous
propagation.

These are the results I published in February 2003:

http://www.briar.demon.co.uk/Ralph/1988_actual.gif

The proof lies not in the fact that Sansbury's predictions do
not match the actual values because the JPL trajectory would be
inaccurate if he were right, but in the fact that that on the
evening of the 6th March (Julian date 2447227.3) his predicted
sequence occurs too early while on the morning of the 7th March
(Julian date 2447227.3) it is too late. This means he has to
correct the JPL position to the east on the 6th but to the west
on the 7th. It is this discrepancy which has always been the
proof since early in 2003.

Sansbury has consistently been unable to grasp this argument so
over the last few weeks so I recently added red arrows to
point out the problem to him:

http://www.briar.demon.co.uk/Ralph/1988_phases.gif

However, this is still too complex so I have presented to him a
simplified version which eliminates the use of the JPL location
and finds the discrepancy in the locations directly from the
received frequencies. I won't repeat the details as I'm sure
eveyone is sick to death of this.

(Dishman claims that his main argument was not this but that the
pattern of received frequencies at two successive sites clearly
reflected the relatively small daily variation of the motion toward
and away from the craft and that the difference in the patterns showed
the nearly instantaneous light speed delay model to be wrong. My
answer to this is that the much large effect of the earth orbital
motion projected through different angles onto the craft-earthsite
lines in different hemispheres accounts for the differences)

However, I have already shown Sansbury how to calculate these
values for himself and shown that the resulting error is less
than 5s in determining the time at which the motion of the
site is perpendicular to the line from the site to the craft.
This is negligible compared to the 5 minute sample rate of
the available data. Further, this is an offset which would
apply to both days almost equally and virtually cancel (there
is a slight difference resulting from the difference in the
apparent altitude of craft from the sites).

The discrepancy between the craft locations obtained on the two
days is approximately 26 degrees and would require a difference
in the offset errors of approximately 100 minutes for Sansbury's
hypothesis to survive this test.

George Dishman