once again didn't say anything about entering ww2 but feel free to add whatever you want and somehow a radar image is not the same as a msg and correct me if i'm wrong you can work out headings from a radar image and the fact that it so happened to be heading towards a military base didn't give the game away to say they didn't know where it was where else in the pacific is a carrier born flight group going to attack it doesn't take a genius to work out the position of the aircraft and their maximum range from an aircraft carrier and what is in front of where they are heading but as you say i'm talking rubbish
Dude, what radar image are you talking about? Clearly you have no idea what radar back then was capable (or rather incapable) of. There was NO radar that could detect a carrier task force in the middle of the Pacific. And guess what, there still isn't. Has everything to do with the curvature of the Earth. That's why these days we have AWACS and other airborne rader systems.
The radars around PH did detect something, but this only gave the base a few minutes warning time. And since a flight of B17's was also due to arrive, it was assumed the signal was the incoming US bombers, not the Japanese Imperial Navy, hellbent on blowing the US Navy to crap.
And as for your question about where else a carrier group could attack in the Pacific? Gee, I don't know... If the Japanese were intent on starting a shooting war with the US, they could have just as easily gone for Midway (which they did), Wake Island (which they did), Guam (which they did), the Phillipines (which they did) and tons of other targets that from a strategic point of view would have made more sense even.
Add to that that the Japanese were already at war with Britain, France and The Netherlands and the conclusion is that a task force like that had a million targets it could attack.
If the US had known that the Japanese were headed for Pearl, they would have set things up so that bombs would have fallen, but damage would have been limited. The planes would not have been bunched up on the apron (which was done because sabotage was considered a far greater threat from Hawaii's large Japanese population and it was easier to guard the planes if they were near eachother), they would have spread out the battleships more, rather than lining them up neatly along Battleship Row, and so forth.
Again, I could go on...