On Tuesday 21 July 2009 10:12:46 Edward Cole wrote:
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:52:08 -0800 To: "STeve Andre'" [email protected], [email protected] From: Edward Cole [email protected] Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Re: Evidence of moon landings....!
LeRoy,
I'm not sure how you can have a source other than NASA, other than two hams who made independant recordings of Apollo transmissions. In 1971 (summer issue) a QST article talks of Dick Knadle(sp?) KRIW who got some, and another ham, I believe W4HHK received signals as well. ------snip
Steve you can add my witness of the Lunar orbiter signal on S-band received on a ten foot comm dish that my supervisor with JPL set up in his yard using a diode mixer and a microwave signal generator for LO. The signal exhibited expected Doppler shift and every 20-minutes or so it dropped out (occulted by the Moon as the orbiter orbited behind). This was not Apollo-11 but one of the other missions afterward, to memory (long time ago - 1971). We both worked at Goldstone tracking facility back then. We only detected the carrier since the dish was insufficient size for recovering the modulated signal.
73, Ed - KL7UW (then K8MWA/K6)
Ed, I completely forgot to discuss the reception of the Lunar orbiter. Yes, we used an old TS-408/U (military version of a hp 608A signal generator) a polaplexer, and Bill Burns 8-foot trailer mounted dish. We got good S/N ratio on the carrier, but couldn't recover information from the sidebands. If I remember correctly, the downlink was about 2287 MHz. The downlink/uplink ratio was 240/221, Milt Brockman's ratio we used in the DSN since the L-band days. 73, Dick K6HIJ
So there you have it.
73, Ed - KL7UW
This is *really* cool. So there are some small number of hams who've done this. Given that we on this list just learned of at least two more receptions, I'm curious how many there are, and how many might have some audio of their efforts. Even just a feeble carrier lurking among the static would be a neat thing to have.
--STeve Andre' wb8wsf en82