leichter@yale-com.UUCP (Jerry Leichter) (10/27/83)
If someone really did want to watch "I Love Lucy" broadcasts, they would have a problem: TV signals are by no means broadcast in a spherically-symmetrical pattern. Rather, since there are few listeners ABOVE the antenna, it is de- signed so that most of the signal is sent out more-or-less tangent to the earth. The result is that a snapshot of the earth at TV frequencies (which pass out of the ionosphere easily) would show a bright ring from TV stations around the edge, seen end on, with very little if anything over most of the sphere. (The same pattern would appear from just about any signal source on earth at these frequencies - radar begin the predominant source after (before?) TV.) However, the Earth is rotating; an observer at a fixed point would get a fairly brief flash of a given TV signal, which would quickly fade out, per- haps to be replaced by another signal. I don't know how long you could expect to receive a signal, but I suspect that even receiving all of a half- hour "Lucy" episode would be iffy - in that half hour, the Earth will have rotated 7.5 degrees. Somewhere or other, I saw a synthesized photo of what the Earth would actually look like at TV frequencies, so someone has done this calculation; however I don't remember where I saw this. -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale