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/