Jason White wrote:
The thread on a lunar based transponder has me wondering.. How were the comms with the Apollo missions done? What frequencies/modes? Did amateurs and utility listeners of the time copy much of anything from the moon while man was there? Did they have these same problems or did the fact that Eagle was in orbit solve them?
Uhhh, both. :-)
Digging (real deep) through the links to the books for sale, videos, and what-not on this website will yield tons of information -- I found a complete diagram of the frequencies used, etc... way down in the links.
Wish I'd have bookmarked that one... but it was just a one-time web-spelunking for fun.
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/
I've heard the crackly "That's one small step.." recordings, and it sort of sounds like SSB, but I had never really thought about it before. Now that I think about it, copying that signal would probably have been the rarest utility DX ever!
Not too bad, really -- just a lot of stations on the ground to deal with the rotation of the earth and the fallibility of the hardware of the day.
The site above has a whole lot of the story of that day's comms, including recordings of the back-channel comms between Houston and the tracking stations. Nifty site.
Nate WY0X