Amateur Radio Moonbounce
by David Harvey VK2DMH on Friday, July 31st, 2009 | 2 Comments
Image via Wikipedia
Is it true that amateur radio operators bounce radio signals off of the moon?
I know that lasers are bounced off of retro-reflectors left on the moon by NASA… But why did they do that if Ham radio operators have done it for years?
Have they really bounced radio signals off the moon’s surface?
(See answers below…)
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Certainly it is true. This is well-documented. Licensed Amateur Radio operators even have contests to see who can talk to the most stations that way. They’re been doing it for years.
Some Radio hams, who were using the 2.3 GHz Amateur Radio band for this, re-tuned their radio receivers down to 2.28 GHz and listened to the Apollo missions.
The reason scientists go to all the trouble of using the Apollo reflectors for ranging is to get coherent signals off the moon they can measure.
Ham Radio signals, on the other hand, illuminate all over the moon’s surface, bounce off innumerable mountains and boulders, and are not very useful for scientific measurements by the time they have traveled back to Earth.
Hams have even bounced signals off venus.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/03/amateur_eve_radio_bounce.html
Eric