If you look at plasma attenuation of a reentry body, it’s about 30 dB. Even a thin sheet of foil or perforated screen is way more (> 100 dB). They just need t

If you look at plasma attenuation of a reentry body, it’s about 30 dB. Even a thin sheet of foil or perforated screen is way more (> 100 dB). They just need to hook an antenna to a spectrum analyzer (with low noise path) and measure the noise density. If it is anywhere slightly above -174 dBm/Hz, then it is not going to function well as a satcom antenna. That picture they show of the tube taped onto the LNB feed, they say it “intercepted” the signal. Do they mean it blocked it? Sure, it will if the plasma is conductive enough, but it should also drop the noise coming out of the receiver. Maybe it swamped the receiver with noise. Can’t tell. If they can pattern the lower frequency antennas, they can certainly take the time to do some noise measurements. Maybe the issue is exciting the plasma, and that is noisy. I’d think you couldn’t do it with pulse excitation unless you limited the rise time. You could do it with CW, say a magnetron, way outside your operating band.