Going thru the telemetry

I ran across this article about how scientists think they have found the reason why the Pioneer spacecraft are off course. Other than interesting from the normal, rocket scientist standpoint, it's interesting to me how they are using the telemetry coming back from the probes all these years to solve the problem. My job sometimes requires me to troubleshoot problems by looking at sets of telemetry data from different time periods. The challenge is to determine what telemetry data is important so that five months later, you have enough to solve a problem. I hate it when I have to look for a problem that is somewhat intermittent and I don't really have any data to use for troubleshooting. I remember one time that..... [Editor Note: To spare our non-technical readers, the Great El-ahrairah was stopped before he was about to go off into techie-dweeb never-neverland and talk about his experiences in computer nirvana.]

Anyway, I guess you have to be a techie-dweeb to really appreciate this article. Now, where is my pocket protector?