Greetings,

Not to be a wet blanket, but what is the advantage of an amateur repeater on the moon?

From a mid-latitude location, the moon is above

the horizon 8.5 to 16 hours per day depending on the season. The repeater would be in darkness and presumably un-powered for 2 weeks each month. Even if it was located in a permently illuminated point near the poles, librations would take it out of view of earth at times.

Link margins would be large, but not insurmountable. Designing a comm package to survive the temperature extremes would be difficult but not impossible. The US and USSR had unmanned landers that survived many lunar day night cycles.

We do have experience flying amateur repeaters on manned space missions. There's one on the ISS right now. It is turned off on a regular basis because of crew time availability and flight safety rules. One can only imagine what constraints would be imposed with a comm package on the moon.

There would be many technical, logistical and financial challenges for a lunar amateur repeater to overcome...and all from an international organization that has yet to replace AO-40.

73, Armando, N8IGJ

Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 04:31:45 -0700 (PDT) From: MM ka1rrw@yahoo.com Subject: [amsat-bb] The Moon is our Future To: kg4zlb@gmail.com, amsat-bb@amsat.org, "Jack K." kd1pe.1@gmail.com Message-ID: 878811.97851.qm@web56408.mail.re3.yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Theoretically we may have a free ride to the Moon for an Amateur radio repeater!