Re: The Shapiro's experiment HOAX. A 1968 TIME article.

SECOND CORRECTION:
I forgot to include the losses due to the beam dispersion after
traveling 200 million Km and bouncing off a poorly small reflective
surface of Mercury, being also that the measurements were taken when
Mercury's line of sight from Earth HAS TO BE the one with Mercury's
reflections of the beam are grazing the Sun's surface.
With luck, 0.1% or less of the power is reflected on such a remote
target, which makes the received power being well below 100 picowatts,
being the received pulses deformed due to Mercury's surface
irregularities.
Also, many propagation degradations and Sun in-band interferences made
VERY DIFFICULT the construction of a MATCHED FILTER at reception, which
is a KEY ELEMENT in radar ranging.
So, there is a wide range of degradation factors in such experiment made
the measurements to be highly doubtful, far beyond the alleged 20%
error.
This highly celebrated HOAX is much more fake than the Pound or Hafele
experiments.
In the years to come, Cassini would improve his HOAX through the use of
information recollected from multiple observatories around the world.
IN ALL CASES, there IS NOT A DETERMINISTIC RESULT. Statistical
processing and filtering was used as the MAIN MATHEMATICAL TOOL. And
it's widely known that STATISTICS are very easy to manipulate, in order
to provide the desired results.