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Operation Moon Bounce
linuxwrangler writes "Today marks the 50th anniversary of the first transmission of human voice via moon bounce. The voice was that of James Trexler and the technique became an important method of communication for the military that was used until the advent of the communications satellite. It is still a popular activity for ham radio operators."
But then there is always the problem of...
Sigs cause cancer.
...latency in the transmission.
Sigs cause cancer.
Moon Bounce is the new wave of telecommunications!
Gravity is not just a law, it's also a good idea.
Oh, so that's why we call the moon a natural satellite!
the technique became an important method of communication for the military that was used until the advent of the communications satellite
;)
Well, i believe this made the moon a communications satellite. but im just a nit-picker
Got my hopes up, for a second I thought the article might be about a sweet new amusement park ride.
"Step right up folks, the new, the amazing, Moon Bounce! Yes thats right, our state of the art ride shoots you off the surface of the Earth, slamming you into the moon, and bouncing you back, hopefully unharmed. Only 5 tickets per ride, but you must be at least 4 feet tall to participate"
Laser EME (moonbounce) without using the moon retroreflectors!
73 de F8EJF
these were moon bounces?
Amateur Radio Enthusiasts do CW (morse) communications using moonbounce, not voice. Given the path loss (c.a. 240dB) and power constraints on amateur stations voice is er.. difficult? (Michael: go look at Trexler's antenna spec!)...
At my local ham radio club, a guy just gave a talk about how he is attempting to implement a 47 GHz EME system. Is is interesting because of the technical challenges. Only a few other people actually operate 47 GHz stations. The travelling wave tube that most use was originally used for military work, for a project called Milstar. Interesting that at the time none of the traffic was coded to their satellites because it was considered intristically safe because it would be very hard to build a station for it.
Some operators do use voice, but have to use big time QRO (high power) stations because the path losses are so huge. Then with new DSP methods, voice communications can definetly work.
More info on "Moon Bounce"
http://www.zetatalk.com/info/tinfo14e.htm
http://www.af9y.com/
John Kerry is a Joke!
Ah yes, the first cell phone in action...
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
Moon bounce isn't something that one can conjure up at will with the flip of a switch. The amateur radio stations doing moonbounce have uber high gain directional antennas and pump 1.5kw (1500 watts), maximum legal power, into them. What you get back is a signal so faint that you then use various pre-amps and notch filtering to pull the signal out of the noise. I was fairly certain moon bounce on ham bands was limited to CW (contious wave aka morse code.) (Morse code takes a very minimal amount of bandwith and thus the power is focused instead of scattered across a large portion of spectrum.) iirc when the government did moonbounce they would pump something more to the order of 500kW.
:(){
If they bounce the signal on the moon would it not be coming back reversed?
;-)
Seriously? (no, not really
Although we may not think about it that much, we owe a lot to the moon for all the things we bounce off it or take whats bounced off it.
/. to help prove general relativity.
The light reflected from the moon provides large people to be able to see with increased accuracy at night (full moons obviously esecially)
We bounce lasers off of it as was recently discussed on
We bounce radio signals from the moon for use in communication. (although to a lesser degree of course)
And although the future is quite fuzzy, I'm sure we'll be bouncing things off that dry old rock for (hopefully) centuries to come.
I tell you, the human ability to use the moon for so many things (useless and not) astounds me.
Finally! Proof that people in the 50's had handwriting as bad as my own!
I read a SF book that used the moon bounce technique to store data. They had markers on the moon for navigation (just reflectors in the rock) People would use a transmitter on earth to send a burst of data to the moon and let it bounce back then retransmit it without storing it. just a loop. You could fit a certain amount of data in the lag. They used it on farther objects to get longer delays. Kind of a strange idea. Box
I haven't finished reading through the article, but I remember reading about this in one of James Bamford's book about the NSA, "Body of Secrets" or "The Puzzle Palace". Basically, when you bounce a directional radio beam off the moon, it can't be intercepted by anyone except those near the place on Earth where the beam bounces back to. This would allow Navy ships at sea to send a message from the open ocean, to the moon, then to Washington without having the message picked up by the Russians. Pretty neat trick, actually.
The reason this was in Bamford's book was that the USS Liberty, the Navy eavesdropping ship that was attacked by the Israelis in 1967, had this type of system on board and it was its primary method of communicating with the NSA people in the US. Unfortunately, the system was unreliable, and the hydraulics or pnumatics controlling the directional antenna often broke, making it unusable. Partly because of this, the ship never got the message to stay away from the conflict zone and was bombed. That's how I remember it, at least.
Maybe that's the danger of relying too much on bleeding-edge technology.
Anyone here heard of other stories of this technology?
"FIRST POST!!"
Is there any record of the unauthorized use of artificial satellites to bounce signals?
and in the fifties I read all about it in "The Lost City," a Rick Brant Electronic Adventure, by John Blaine. (Pseudonym of Harold Leland Goodwin). Like Tom Swift, but more up-to-date and nerdier. This is based on many-decade-old recollections, but they end up stranded on a mountain ledge in Tibet with a hand-crank generator. As I recall the book mentions that they need to crank quite hard to power the filaments in the vacuum tubes. It's Morse Code, of course, not voice. I seem to recall that the radio waves are described as being in the radar wavelength range, but it's really been a long time and I'm into very unreliable memory here.
I wish I could remember why they need to go to Tibet to test the equipment. Probably because If They Didn't, There Wouldn't Have Been Any Story.
Rick's father is a dignified scientist. Rick and his father are always accompanied by lovable sidekicks Zircon (?) and, um, can't remember his name exactly, it's not "Chowdah" but something like that--an Indian (not a native American, but a person from India) who speaks amusingly broken English and makes comic errors due to his entire knowledge of the Western world having been obtained from a copy of the World Almanac.
There seems to be quite a bit more about this at this website
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, I believe Mir (the former Russian space station) has been used as a passive reflector.
Z
Until someone slashdots the Moon.
they obviously had more than one kind of radio on board. The identity and their location was known to everyone concerned, israelis, the ship itself, and other US assets out in the med and elsewhere, along with various international HAMS who were monitoring what they could of the ongoing war taking place. The attack was delibarate, and designed to pin the blame on egypt (best credible analysis, IMO) in order to garner support for more US intervention and support for the israeli side. They went so far as to strafe survivors for hours in an attempt to kill all the witnesses. They didn't suceed, but to this day the attack continues to be excused as an "accident". The implications in todays politics are there, just extrapolate it as to how far a nation would go to get it's way in international affairs. I know this isn't an exact answer to your question with moon bounce radios, I just wanted to interject about radios in general and on the topic you raised of the attack on the Liberty. Here is a brief history of it for anyone:
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0693/9306019.htm
June 1993, Page 19
This Month in History
The Assault on the USS Liberty Still Covered Up After 26 Years
By James M. Ennes Jr.
Twenty-six years have passed since that clear day on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance. Israeli pilots circled the ship at low level 13 times on eight different occasions before attacking. Radio operators in Spain, Lebanon, Germany and aboard the ship itself all heard the pilots reporting to their headquarters that this was an American ship. They attacked anyway. And when the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime.
There is no question that this attack on a U.S. Navy ship was deliberate. This was a coordinated effort involving air, sea, headquarters and commando forces attacking over a long period. It was not the "few rounds of misdirected fire" that Israel would have the world believe. Worse, the Israeli excuse is a gross and detailed fabrication that disagrees entirely with the eyewitness recollections of survivors. Key American leaders call the attack deliberate. More important, eyewitness participants from the Israeli side have told survivors that they knew they were attacking an American ship.
Israeli Pilot Speaks Up
Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested.
Later, a dual-citizen Israeli major told survivors that he was in an Israeli war room where he heard that pilot's radio report. The attacking pilots and everyone in the Israeli war room knew that they were attacking an American ship, the major said. He recanted the statement only after he received threatening phone calls from Israel.
The pilot's protests also were heard by radio monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Then-U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter has confirmed this. Porter told his story to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and offered to submit to further questioning by authorities. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. government has any interest in hearing these first-person accounts of Israeli treachery.
Key members of the Lyndon Johnson administration have long agreed that this attack was no accident. Perhaps most outspoken is former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer. "I can never accept the claim that this was a mistaken attack," he insists.
Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk is equall
I swear, for 5-10 seconds my dyslexic self read this thread title as "Operation Moore Bounce" and I had an instant mental picture of Letterman dropping Michael Moore from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater. "That'd be pretty f*in sweet!" I thought to myself.
The challenge mentioned here is still open, and remains so even after all the comments about how easy it must be that were made here
KTLA were the first commercial radio station to bounce a signal off of the moon and back. I think it started "Hello World!"- now you know the rest of the story. The Government thought space aliens were arriving and the radio station got a lot of press, and I think that the FCC were peeved. It made all the newspapers.
KTLA are/were out of Los Angeles, CA, and the stunt was in the '54 -'57 time frame.
Though 1954 marked the first voice bouncing off the moon the first transmission bounced off the moon was in 1947.
The Gubberment has you all fooled!!!
They really just bounced that first transmission off of a hollywood sound stage.....
How much data can you temporarily store as bits between here, the moon, and back?
Okay, shut down the war until the moon rises again.
Let's see. Stealth fighter-bombers no moon. Communication yes moon. Bomb first, and talk about it afterwards.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Um...wouldn't it be more properly categorized as a satellite phone?
Wow. I wouldn't really consider EME very popular. Also, isn't it mainly CW.
To all you people commenting about telecommunications via the moon, its not all that funny. Its kina (really) cool that the moon can be used as a great big satellite. It paved the way for satelites of today. Also, we amateurs regularly evaluate our stations's radiated power, so the risk of cancer is very low.
73 de KG6OSQ
Check out the Amateur Radio Club of Alameda's Web site at www.ashcraftfamily.net/arca/.
America will soon learn what a mistake it was to invade our lands and kill our people. 37,000 have died in Iraq, and we will make your people pay ten times over! What happened on 11 September was nothing compared to what our holy warriors have planned for you, very soon!
Death to America! Death to the invaders in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Palestine!