How were the 100+ antennas around Telstar 1 and 2 configured?

Question

Telstar 1 and 2 demonstrated routing of telephone, television and other communications types between continents.

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum pages below contain images of the satellites. They show two rows of non-very-directional antennas that completely circle the "equator" of the spherical satellite, pointing radially outwards in a complete circle.

I estimate there are about 42 of the larger antennas and 64 of the smaller ones.

Question: How were all of the over 100 antennas distributed in these two rings configured to receive and transmit signals, since at any time half to most of them wouldn't be pointing at the US or Europe?

This illustration from 1962 shows the major components of Bell Systems’ experimental communications satellite.

Source: Smithsonian Air and Space Museum page Satellite Components

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Backup spacecraft for Telstar, the world’s first active communications satellite. Telstar 1 began an era of live international television. After its launch on July 10, 1962, it relayed television images between the United States and France and England.

Source: cropped from Smithsonian Air and Space Museum page Telstar

Answer 1

Telstar 1 carried a single transponder with 6390MHz uplink and 4170MHz downlink.

All the 72 ports in the small-aperture ring were ganged together to make a single receive antenna with a toroidal pattern that extended 30 degrees above/below the equator of the satellite, but had even gain as the satellite spun.

The 48 ports in the larger-aperture ring worked the same way for transmit.

The overall energy budget was amazingly marginal. The solar cells only provided 14W, feeding a 3W TWT. There was no power (and probably no weight budget) to do anything other than to make the antennas from passively combined ports in a time before microwave semiconductor amplifiers. The satellite had to be spin stabilized (with a passive coning damper), and there was no way to aim a higher gain antenna.

Source: "A General Description of the Telstar Spacecraft", R.H. Shennum and P.T. Haury, 1963, published in NASA SP-32 p.801. See particularly Figure 4 on page 806 which shows the single transponder circuit, and section VII (pp 812-816) on antennas, which includes as Figure 6 the top image in the question and the pattern described above as Figure 7 and 8.

For more technical detail, please see "The Spacecraft Antennas", J.T. Bangert, R.S. Engelbrecht, E.T. Harkless (yes, that Harkless), R.V. Sperry and E.J. Walsh, 1963, published in NASA SP-32 p.869.