After carefully observing dim objects in the night sky, you don't want to waste any precious signal on its way from the telescope dish to the detector. But in the case of far-infrared astronomy, it's not as easy as it sounds to transport the signal efficiently. In fact, it's even an endeavor to measure the exact amount of signal that gets lost. Scientists from SRON and TU Delft have now found a new, easier way to determine the signal loss. In the process they designed a signal-carrying microstrip for the DESHIMA-2 instrument that loses only 1 in 4,900 photons. The results are published in Physical Review Applied.