The Amateur radio community does not have the resources to build a better communication system than a professional commercial company.

So we have two options, use existing lander hardware for communication or design our own stand alone transceiver project that just uses existing power and or antennas.

After the lander has released the Rover, the lander “May” have some unused resources. Lets see if any of these unused resources (if any) can be used for Amateur Radio projects.

How is the Lander going to be powered? Batteries only: If so, there will be no power for projects. The lander telemetry will stop after a few days. This is not a likely scenario.

Solar Panels and Batteries: In this option, there may be some available power during lunar days to run other projects. This is the most sensible solution.

Atomic Battery: This is the best option, however it’s politically sensitive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

The power source is one of the keys to designing a possible Amateur Radio project. Let’s ping our contacts at NASA and see what we can learn about the Moon Lander projects.

Flash Back: On ISS, the Russian team proposed that we re-use navigation antennas from the FGB modules for Amateur Radio (1996). The idea worked and on the very first ISS mission we had access to an already installed antenna. It was a simple idea and it worked.

Education Spin: Contributing to the project from a scientific nature may be difficult, we will have to get some universities involved, or we could focus on the educational nature of the project. Lets try to put the educational spin that School and university are communication via the Moon, with radio station designed and built by the schools.

I am not saying that NASA would approve this project, but until we try we will not know. This project does not have to be an AMSAT project, we can make it a University project.

Sincerely Miles WF1F

--- On Mon, 7/6/09, James French [email protected] wrote:

From: James French [email protected] Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] ILN... Is this our future ride to the moon? MM To: "MM" [email protected] Cc: [email protected], "Armando Mercado" [email protected] Date: Monday, July 6, 2009, 9:33 AM On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 05:53 -0700, MM wrote:

...

Yes Exactly!

We need to form a proposal team that can evaluate the

data to find out

...

if an EME-Repeater is viable.

Time is short.

One thing, Miles.

Frank Bauer commented: On another topic, WRT the Lunar ILN, if you read the solicitation, they are discussing *15 kg* payloads.  And these need to accomplish some scientific objective to further lunar exploration.   Given this, I do not think the ILN is a viable AMSAT project.

What would be the SCIENTIFIC payload that we would be providing?

I know that I mentioned in previous replies that we MIGHT be able to land a chance on something that A government would be doing if we could MAYBE provide a communications package for a craft. Going by Frank's statement and putting it into the context of what we are planning, I would NOT be surprised that we got turned down because we are not prov- iding something that contributes to the SCIENTIFIC nature of the mission. The government probably ALREADY has a contractor to build and provide the communications package(s) for these missions.

Is there anything else that is being proposed that we can get in on the ground floor to provide this knowledge and equipment? I haven't seen anything and personally I didn't even know about the ILN even.

I am NOT trying to be the one to burst the bubble here. This subject HAS been brought up a number of times over the past four years of putt- ing something on the lunar surface. Each time, the answers and suggest- ions have gotten better as we have gotten more people that know what it takes climb on board the discussion. Hopefully this time this discussion will get past just that, discussion, and progress to an Idea of Concept stage that can then be taken to the next step, finding a suitable candi- date for this.

James W8ISS