Edward R. Cole wrote:
With a manned base I would offer that a tracking antenna is practical. Perhaps it could be made piggy-back to NASA's comm system? Of course there is always electronically steered arrays. Perhaps a quad of dishes pointed to cover the 10-degree area of lunar sky the earth moves thru? Then only a 4-way coax switch to track. The 8-foot dish on the Moon has a 3.65 degree bw at 2400 MHz.
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73's Ed - KL7UW
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?
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!
curious,
Jason N1XBP