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."

Comments

Even better

[f8ejf]

Laser EME (moonbounce) without using the moon retroreflectors!

73 de F8EJF

Voice via Moonbounce *NOT*

[Fallen Andy]

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!)...

More info

[john_smith_45678]

More info on "Moon Bounce"

http://www.zetatalk.com/info/tinfo14e.htm
http://www.af9y.com/

it's not as easy as it sounds

[quelrods]

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.

Re:Moon Bounce for imformation storage

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

It's nothing strange nor is it science ficton, it's called a delay line memory and it was used in early computers