post and followups to sci.astro

Ralph, please don't send this to sci.optics, nobody there
is the least bit interested in using microwave telemetry
for space navigation.



"r9ns" wrote in message
om...
....

"George Dishman" wrote in message
...

...
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.

Nonsense. On Feb 12 2003 you ran some tables from Horizon and said
"Note that the first has changed by 1kHz..." and your tables showed a
1171.3424Hz closer prediction according to the conventional model than
my nearly instantaneous model and then you concluded "They are
sufficiently far apart to distinguish the hypotheses"

You were arguing that it wasn't possible to tell the
two theories apart and I showed that the difference
was easily enough for us to use as a test. I make no
claims in that post about validity but if you look
little above the bit you quoted, I said:

"No, the stations are not 180 degrees apart! Madrid was
the transmitting station so check the longitude. This is
what I have been saying, there are only special occasions
when the difference in longitude and the time delay
conspire to match, in general they don't"

That's the point I was making earlier this week, the
effect of longitude of the sites in the sine wave
produced by the rotation of the Earth is key to
understanding these arguments and it not mentioned
in your summary.

Do you remember now and retract your accusation?

Snipping the details of 1) and 2) may make this clearer. Your
paragraph above says:

"Dishman ... mistakenly claimed that 1) ... and 2) ...
proved the validity of the conventional light speed delay
assumption,"

What I said it that the results are sufficiently far apart
to distinguish which site was transmitting. That is enough
to prove your theory false but it does not prove the
conventional theory correct as you imply. It is a subtle
but important point.

If you said "Dishman claimed that the lack of agreement of
the Pioneer results with the assumption of near-instantaneous
light propagation proved the invalidity of that assumption."
then that would be reasonable, just leave out the bit about
proving the conventional theory.

I am only asking you to correct the false impression you are
giving in the document at present.

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

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

snip

I invented nothing of the sort.

OK, I'll retract that then, sorry if I got the wrong
impression.

The Anderson paper and other
materials about P10 that you sent to me, say that the craft was always
transmitting

Yes, that is correct but navigational quality measurements
were only possible when the signal received from the craft
was transmitted at a time when it was simultaneously
receiving an uplink. In the latter years, they couldn't
even acquire the downlink signal unless there was an uplink.

and that 99percent of the receptions occurred while the
transmitter was on.

Well I think less than 99% but I haven't examined all the
data, just the few example days in March 1988, but that
doesn't matter, it is the 1% that proves you wrong.

Thus the fact that in some very few instances where Markwardt
claims there was reception when the transmitter was off does not mean
that the receiver could not have been receiving signals sent directly
from the craft and not signals received by the craft and relayed back
to the earth site receiver.

Yes it does, the papers clearly say they were unable
to lock on to the craft signal without the uplink.
Unless there was a signal from the receive site, it
must have come from one of the other sites and since
in general they were below the horizon at the time of
reception, this disproves your near-instantaneous
hypothesis.

Note I am _not_ saying this fact proves the conventional
theory correct, only that it proves your wrong.

However, the proof we have developed in the last few
weeks removes all these aspects. Since it only uses
the recorded frequencies, some basic information about
the Earth's orbit and a single assumption that the
craft is more than 10AU from Earth, I don't think you
can find a flaw in it (other than by claiming not to
understand the method I use).

George