[amsat-bb] Re: Lunar Architecture Moon Base

[Jason White]

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.
<snip>
> 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