On Sun, 2 Oct 2016, Hils wrote:

On 02/10/16 15:23, analogdial wrote:
Michael Black wrote:

On Sat, 1 Oct 2016, analogdial wrote:


They should at least try to keep up. Herman Munster talked to Martians
with his ham radio 50 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqM1xeseX98

But he didn't win an award.

There's actually a cup waiting, has been since the twenties or thirties,
for the first ham to contact mars. I guess it was mostly a joke, on the
other hand back then Mars wsa big in the news, all those canals. And radio
was still developing, going for greater and greater distances, so why not
set ones sights on another planet?

I'm not sure of the exact rules, though.

Disqualified on a technicality. Herman Munster didn't contact Martians
on Mars, but Martians in a spaceship near Earth.

From 2011: "Amateur radio enthusiasts using a restored dish antenna in
Germany say they have successfully picked up telemetry from NASA's Mars
Science Laboratory spacecraft, now outward bound for Mars [...]"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11...osity_signals/

And 2014: "James Miller, G3RUH, was among a small handful of Amateur Radio
operators to receive the X band signal January 21 from the European Space
Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, some 500 million miles from Earth. Miller used
the 20 meter dish at the Bochum Amateur Radio facility in Germany, run by
AMSAT-DL and IUZ Bochum Observatory. In an AMSAT-BB post, Miller noted the
frequency at the spacecraft was 8421.786900 MHz, and the signal was 14 dB
below that of the STEREO A/B spacecraft. Perhaps more astonishing, Bertrand
Pinel, F5PL, was able to track Rosetta 65 kilometers from Toulouse using his
“home-rigged” 3.5 meter dish and receiver. Viljo Allik, ES5PC, a member of
Estonian Student Satellite Program team reported his group was able to detect
the satellite’s signal using a slightly smaller dish."

http://www.arrl.org/news/radio-amate...rom-deep-space

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/01...etta-tracking/

But for the purposes of most or all amateur radio contests and
certificates, the contacts have to be two way. Otherwise, it would be an
SWL contest.

There was talk, and it actually seemed to have some substance, of sending
a amateur radio package to the moon on one of the later manned flights.
Someone found empty space in the lunar crawler, so they were working on a
repeater to fit in there. The guy died, so the project died, but it
looked like they actually had some encouragement from NASA.

Some hams wanted to put amateur radio into Skylab and effort was put into
that, but it was denied, I can't remember the reasons.

Michael