[amsat-bb] Re: The Moon is our Future

[Armando Mercado]

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 at yahoo.com>
>Subject: [amsat-bb]  The Moon is our Future
>To: kg4zlb at gmail.com, amsat-bb at amsat.org, "Jack K."
><kd1pe.1 at gmail.com>
>Message-ID: <878811.97851.qm at 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!