The first amateur radio station on the moon | Hacker News Reader

The first amateur radio station on the moon

arrl.org

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A radio club in the Netherlands were able to receive it with their twenty five meter diameter dish.

https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2024/uhf-signals-of-japanese-m...

That's awesome.

Also, I misread your last word as "fish" and for a moment there it was even more interesting.

Everything is an antenna if you try hard enough.

I lived in an apartment complex as a young adult. I used to load up the rain gutters as my HF antenna. I might not have been the biggest signal on the air, but it did make contacts.

Cleaned the gutters, too.

That'd be a whale of an antenna.

Did anyone know of this earlier? This is my first time hearing of this and I’m bummed that I didn’t have time to get something set up to receive this. Not just any antenna can receive a 1w signal from the moon and the poor guy is about to be killed by the lunar night

Also bummed but also couldn't have received anything. I have a decent HF homebrew antenna setup, but nothing that would work on UHF.

Very cool to see though.

I work at a large lab and probably could have made something happen. But yes, it's great that they sent this out to the HAMs. Was happy to see that some people managed to capture the signal

Gotta get a bigger antenna for my baofeng to receive this.

I know this is a joke, but you can get a shocking amount out of a baofeng with a good antenna, a preamp and some good filtering.

Whether that's worth it compared to just buying a more reliable radio probably depends on how much you want to DIY.

After my third Baofeng handheld [1], I finally had to get a "real" receiver. But the 3B's are still useful for additional listening stations and/or for friends.

—73

[1] The volume potentiometer becomes unreliable after regular on/offs. The major concern is that after a few years, some "steps" of volume randomly mutes (with no indication, you just don't hear the incoming).

Any recommendations for a substitute of the included antenna? Either a base or a portable.

DIY: slim jim, J pole (https://m0ukd.com/calculators/slim-jim-and-j-pole-calculator...) or quarter wave ground plane (https://m0ukd.com/calculators/quarter-wave-ground-plane-ante...). A slim jim made from 450 ohm ladder line and rolled up for storage, hoisted into a tree by a cord, is a favourite. A NanoVNA will help a lot while building any of these.

Commercial portable: Nagoya NA-771 (beware clones)

Commercial fixed: Diamond X30, X50 or V2000 colinear.

With any upgraded antenna on a receiver with little filtering like the Baofeng, you may deafen it into hearing no wanted signals if operating it in an RF-hot environment.

Don't transmit without a licence.

For portable you could buy a Diamond antenna but beware of fakes (https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/how-to-spot-a-fake...) See that you buy one with the right connector (RP?, male/female). I have an srj77 from diamond on my anytone that fits and works fine.

For larger handheld or fixed you could build/buy a yagi antenna that has a higher directionality/gain.

That was one of my first computer programs: compute a 'perfect' Yagi for a given frequency. Of course it will never be perfect because you will use tubes with a non-zero diameter and there will be something to carry the reflectors on and so on but it's amazing how close you can get if you cut and space precisely.

I've used baofeng as a base for a while. I put a home-made yagi on the roof of a shed and I could communicate with probably a few dozen active repeaters, some hundreds of miles away. Had to rotate the yagi via a state of the art "nylon rope" system.

Congrats to the Japanese ham enthusiasts! Big achievement.

Great news! Next we need to get a radio station on the moon doing MEM (or Earth-bouncing)

One step closer to the coveted Elser-Mathes cup!

That's a small step on that particular challenge. The difficulty factor must be many orders of magnitude higher. I'd try optical before I'd go for radio waves, a nice laser might be easier to detect at those distances because the signal doesn't spread nearly as much. Of course your aim would have to be correspondingly better as well.

That is one ugly cup [1].

[1] https://mastodon.radio/@AB4UG/106337784937609102

Good job!

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