David wrote:
On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 02:15:09 +0000, jimp wrote:

David wrote:
On Sat, 05 Jan 2013 04:02:59 -0800, JIMMIE wrote:

The beer got flowing the other day and some of my friends and I got to
BSing about the possibility of transmitting a microwave pulse and
reciving it reflected off the moon. Plans are to use a microwave oven
magnetron for the transmitter. We were wondering if this would be
legal.

No, it would not be legal to do it as you described. However, there
are lots of ways to do it legally:

And why not in the USA?

Microwave oven mangetrons operate at 2.45 GHz, which is the top of the
2.39 to 2.45 GHz band and should be trivial to pull down a little bit.

All modes are allowed in the band.

All licencess other than Novice can use the band.

Microwave magnetrons would likely have unacceptable spurs and sidelobes,
as the frequency is not very stable.

Spurs are highly unlikely with a cavity based device like a magnetron.

Sidelobes are an artifact of antennas, not oscillators, unless you are
talking about modulation sidelobes which are pretty trivially dealt with
in a pulse device.

The frequency stability of a magnetron is highly correlated to the
power supply, i.e. the anode voltage.

The power supply and pulse control of an oven would be useless for any
sort of communications, so one would need to build one that pulled
the frequency down into the amateur band and provided for some sort of
modulation scheme.

The simplest modulation would be very high speed CW.