"matt weber" wrote in message
...

Wouldn't a moonbounce setup, with high power and a steerable antenna,
also
have tropo scatter capability? It wouldn't necessarly go the other way,
however. Equipment which works well enough for tropo scatter might not
do
the moonbounce job.

Tropo is probably harder than Moonbounce.

That's an overgeneralization. There's no way it would be easier to
moonbounce a signal to a location 20 miles over the horizon than it would be
to use tropo scatter.


That's one of the reasons
there was no civilian use of Tropo. Amateurs were using 1 Kw in the
1950's in the 6 meter band.

No civilian use as of when? The 1964 ARRL handbook says:

"Tropospheric scatter is prevalent all through the v.h.f. and microwave
regions, and is usable over distances up to about 400 miles."

The 1955 handbook also mentions tropospheric propagation at vhf and above,
but isn't so specific.

The biggest problem with early vhf work wasn't a lack of power or
insufficently high gain antennas, it was unstable oscillators. Those
oscillators drifted, and the radios had to have an otherwise excessively
wide IF bandwidth in order to allow for the drift. Getting a very narrow CW
bandwidth at vhf, for a decent signal to noise ratio, was almost impossible.

By the way, the 1983 handbook says:

"Most EME signals tend to be near the threshold of readability, a condition
caused by a combination of path loss, Faraday rotation and libration
fading."

It seems early 60s radio amateur equipment would work for tropo scatter, up
to about 400 miles. A later generation of such equipment would have to work
signals near the threshold of readability.




Admitted very limited bandwidth, but
Tropo needs tens of kilowatts.

The ARRL says different.


I don't doubt the antenna was capable of Moonbounce, but by the mid
1960's, there wasn't a good reason to use Moonbounce any longer. The
geometry had to line up, so you might have wait a long time (12 hours
or more if you were unlucky), whereas a Sat was almost guaranteed to
come into view in a few hours, and if the military had bought capacity
on Syncom (and I have no idea if they did or didn't), they wouldn't
have to wait at all...



There was, and is, a very good reason for the military to have moonbounce
capability. Things go wrong. Things break. Things get attacked. The more
options we have, the better chance we have to keep a bad situation from
getting totally fouled up. That's true, even for very difficult options
like moonbounce.

Frank Dresser