Robert Rolf wrote:
> Nate Duehr wrote:
>
>>I have been fascinated with the radio/telemetry stuff on the Mars
>>rovers.  12 watts into a low-gain antenna doesn't do half bad!  And the
>
>
> It's the other side of the link that truly makes it possible. How many 30+ meter
> dishes are there in the deep space tracking network? Think of the movie "The Dish".

Yeah, lowering the temperature of your receive antenna here on Earth to
about -400F helps quite a bit!  ;-)  Bye bye thermal noise!  The DSN has
some really nice toys.

(Actually "quite a bit" is a silly statement... an entire RF link budget
gets better on both ends as you make one end better [as long as the
benefit goes to both TX and RX].  Antenna systems changes almost always
give the most bang for the buck, and the DSN has some killer antenna
systems...)

Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com

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