Can't remember the story except that it has court room replay of radio conversation between accused and accuser. On 1st replay, looks like accused is guilty. Expert called in and advises that there should be a 2 second lag with accused talk, due to radio waves bouncing off the ionisphere. Doing this on replay shows accused is innocent.
Please help.
Thanks
HMM sound interesting, I will look it up after work tonight. A small point it is "ionosphere". I once spent 5 hours looking up a misspelling :) A quick search says only 18 stories with lawyer and ionosphere.
Good Hunting, limab
Two seconds is far too long for radio waves to reflect off anything in Earth's atmosphere. Light is a lot faster than that.
There would be a very short delay, a maximum of just over 4/1000 (four thousandths) of a second.
Two seconds is far too long for radio waves to reflect off anything in Earth's atmosphere. Light is a lot faster than that.
To put some numbers to that, the distance light travels in one second is approximately 186 thousand miles. The circumference of the Earth at the equator is just under 25 thousand miles.
Assuming it kept skipping off the ionosphere, a strong enough radio signal would circle the Earth 7.5 times in one second.
Bouncing a radio signal off the Moon and back to the Earth would give a 2.6 second delay
It's been a while since I was around them but I believe that voice activated two-way radios take a second or two to de-key when you stop talking. Even push-to-talk radios have a noticeable pause after you finish while you release the button, the radio de-keys, then the repeater de-keys, and then the person responding keys their mike. It might not be 2 full seconds but it's at least a long, full second at a minimum.
