Can I use the moon as a passive radio satellite?

Question

Can I use the moon to reflect my own radio signals so that I can communicate via radio on the other side of the earth? What kind of frequencies do you think would be the most efficient?

Answer 1

You must be a licensed ham radio operator, but try 10 meters. You need a very high gain yagi antenna and a rotor. You will also need an HF rig.

Answer 2

No, the moon cannot be used for radio broadcast purposes because there is no ITU agreement to allow such a thing. No one has requested to do this because of the very speciallized and expensive equipment that would be required of the listeners. Besides returning a very weak signal, the moon is a moving target and the antenna would have to track the path continuously. Commercial broadcast satellites are geostationary (stay put in the sky) and have on-board transmitters to relay a strong signal back to earth, they are not a simple reflector.

The longest possible path from transmitter to receiver is less than half-way around the earth. This is because both must be viewing the moon at the same time. The communication window is very short under this condition as the moon will be setting (going below horizon) for one of the parties.

The only non-experimental non-broadcast users of moon bounce are radio amateurs who do this on a regular basis using primarily 6m (50 MHz) and 2m (144 MHz) bands. Also this is usually done with morse code and not talking, as the long path fades and distorts the modulation.

Answer 3

Why not the National Security Agency did that for years, before the launch of man-made communications satellites made a better mechanism for relaying information. you do need some fairly specialized equipment and the signal will degrade a lot on it's round trip.

Answer 4

it has been done by others, read this article mate:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,863672,00.html