AD6E wrote:
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I'm not denying that it's a good modulation scheme. I studied that stuff in grad school back when it was not very practical.
The 1993 Nobel committee thought the techniques worked well. Of course the 1993 Physics NP was awarded, not for weak signal detection methods, but rather for the discovery of the binary pulsar by Taylor and his student Hulse (both radio amateurs). Taylor and Hulse predicted that gravitational waves strong enough to be detected on earth are emitted by their newly discovered binary pulsar. I suppose the weak signal methods were crucial in their work. Their amateur radio backgrounds are mentioned in biographical sketches submitted on their winning of the NP:
[Taylor, fortunately for all of us, continued to be interested in amateur radio, whereas Hulse dropped the hobby).
Taylor and Hulse's discovery stimulated the building of large gravitational wave detectors called LIGO's. in the past couple years, gravitational waves were, for the first time, detected by measurements in Louisiana and Washington State, thus verifying another significant prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity, and really increasing the impact of Taylor and Hulse's work.
In June a third gravitational wave "chirp" was detected by the LIGO detector at Hanford, WA. Details at:
73 Bill n6zfo