Inner Workings of High-Gain Mars Rover Antennas?

cavac asks: "I've been searching for detailed info on how the high gain antennas on the Mars Rovers work, but did not find much useful information except that they DO work. I've been wondering: they are disc-shaped and are approximately the size of a CD. They somehow reassemble parabolic antennas but actually aren't, are they? Anyway, how much use would a parabolic antenna that size have? When I first saw them, they reminded me of the old antennas[*] (enclosed in plastic) used on vacuum tube based radio projects[*]. So, what's really inside the Mars Rovers high gain antennas? Note: Links marked with [*] are german language but the pictures should be self explaining."

Well, it is mars

[Descartes]

I'm not a radio expert so I don't really know what design they use, but you need to take into account two major points.

1. The rover is operating outside of FCC restrictions. So it can use as much bandwidth as it wants. Also, because there are few other sources of radio signals on mars there is likely no trouble with interference.

2. Because mars has a drastically different atmosphere than earth, the way the signals travel, etc will be different. From what I understand, much of earth based radio communication relies on bouncing signals off of the upper atmosphere and other "tricks". And of course if the atmosphere is thinner it will offer less resistance to the signal.

Re:From the Nasa website...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good attempt to karma-whore; that link is one click in from the one posted in the question, and doesn't actually say anything about the design of the high-gain antennas. Design? Gain? Directional characteristics? Nothing remotely useful here..

Re:Important Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose you knew that the frequency was 8.123456GHz, the encoding was QPSK, the protocol was CCCSP, the error correction was Reed-Solomon, etc. Now all you need to interpret data coming down from the lander is a big freakin' huge 34m dish.