2 ms·

Yes, but isn't interferometry only useful in increasing the angular resolution? It doesn't necessarily boost the signal.

• akiselev 6y ago
  That's if you're trying to reconstruct a "picture" of what the interferometer is pointed at. If you control both the transmitter and receiver, you can use many different techniques to pack more information into the same amount of power. 2G cellular radios, for example, were 2 watts max power while 3G and 4G radios are 500 milliwatts max power despite being orders of magnitude faster thanks to better encoding due to radio sensitivity and spatial resolution due to MIMO - the cellular equivalent of an astronomical interferometer. The technical term is space-time block coding [1]. The speed negotiation would take at least 3x the distance between the two start systems though, until which time they'd be limited to a conservative estimate based on the channel impairment between the star systems, aka max expected noise between the two astronomical phased arrays. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_block_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_block_code