"matt weber" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 08:13:45 GMT, "Frank Dresser"
wrote:



Having it pointed straight up is the standard stowed position. At lot
less load on the mounting that way. However it could just as easily be
a tropo scatter antenna, and tropo scatter has the advantage that the
moon doesn't have to visible at both ends of the path.

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.


however it could also have used a communication satellite. I think
only Syncom III was in Geo Syncrhonos orbit at that time, however
there were a number of other sats in LEO and MEO (such as Telstar)
that could have been used, and they would come into view every few
hours and would be usable for 15-30 minutes at a time with a usable
bandwidht of a few MHZ. The Syncom III video wasn't so great, since it
was a 2 Mhz transponder IIRC, and analog Television is 6Mhz.

. The first Telstar went up in 1962, and I would be indeed surprised
is several Military sats didn't have similar capabilities at that
time. In the fall of 1967 I remember a professor of Meteoroloby at the
University of Wisconsin telling me about a single UHF transponder they
had put on one of the Tiros weather sats in orbit that could be used
(and was used as a voice channel). The roof of the Meteorology
department at UW had a modest steerable corner reflector to use it..
As it was in LEO, it only took about 50 watts on each end.

Again, what works for moonbounce ought to more than meet the standard for
satellite work.

The Liberty was said to have had moonbounce capability. I'd figure they
used that large parabolic antenna for that purpose. There's no obvious
reason they couldn't have used it for the less demanding tasks of tropo
scatter and satellite comms.

Frank Dresser