A Ham Radio Weekend for Talking to the Moon
Dogs bay at it. Lovers swoon under it. And some people like to bounce their voices off it. The first two are easy, but sending a voice signal 239,200 miles to the moon and back is not quite as simple.
On Saturday, amateur radio buffs or “hams,” as they call themselves, will hold a global bounce-fest, using as many giant parabolic antenna radio telescopes as they can borrow around the world. Not that one needs an excuse to hold a moon-bounce, but this one is being held as a kind of advance celebration of the 40th anniversary next month of the Apollo 11 mission.
Moon-bouncing, also known as Earth-Moon-Earth communications, or E.M.E. requires a higher grade of ham-radio technology than that used for traditional earth-bound communication across parts of the radio spectrum approved by governments for amateur use. Only about 1,000 hams worldwide have stations capable of moon-bouncing.L33tdawg: The Malaysian Amateur Radio Emergency Service (MARES) will be conducting a HAM Radio Village at HITBSecConf2009 - Malaysia in October. Members from MARES will be on-site to answer all your HAM radio questions and a comm-link with the International Space Station (ISS) is also planned.
