>“Everything about a phone is built around time-synching on the order of 5 to 10 milliseconds,” Wisniewski says. “That works just fine with a tower that’s a quarter mile away, 3 miles away even, but not for orbit.”You know, that's an excellent point...
I'm guessing (but not knowing!) -- that the farther a signal needs to be synched in space -- deep space for example -- the larger possible "time interval" / "time skew" / "time jitter" (for lack of better terminology, I am not a signal engineer!) -- between signal components!
Consider the following question in theoretical physics:
Let's suppose someone could choose a point in the universe, all the way across the universe (like let's suppose the universe is like a circle, and the point chosen is diametrically opposite to where you are now -- the farthest point opposite your own, on the circle's circumference.)
And let's suppose you could send a radio signal from this most far point in the universe -- and somehow receive it where you are now...
If you could -- then the $64,000 question is:
"What does that radio signal look like at the endpoint, once it has traversed all of that space?"
Because it probably has been transformed in some way, before it reaches its destination...
Maybe it has not only become phase shifted and/or time skewed -- in some way...
Perhaps that signal, by the time it reaches the longest point in the universe away from it -- has been completely Fourier Transformed...
If most of that signal at its point of origin was originally in the frequency domain (like most signals are) -- then perhaps that signal, in its journey over miles and miles of endless space -- is now mostly in the time domain...
Or, I'll go for "full crackpot" --
Perhaps what defines the largest possible distance between two points in space -- is the Fourier Transform of all signals present in one point in space/time -- Fourier transformed -- at another point in space/time...
(Or perhaps I should call space/time -- time/space -- its reciprocal/inverse ?)
But perhaps this is all wrong!
Perhaps the opposite to a point in space -- is all other points in Space!
Or, all other points in Time...
Well, whatever the case, it would be interesting to know what signal transformations are necessary to get a given signal the farthest to/from deep space...
At least for future, outside of our solar system, space missions...