In article ,
matt weber wrote:
On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:33:19 GMT, (Mark Zenier)
wrote:
Before satellites the Defense Department was able to send several
teletype channels at at time, maritime mobile. That was with a big dish
and probably 10's of kilowatts. (The best description of using that
equipment, that I've seen, was in a description of the incident where the
USS Liberty, the radio intelligence ship, was attacked by the Israelis.
In the Atlantic Monthly about 10-15 years ago, as I remember).
Yes, but that wasn't moonbounce, it was tropo scatter. YOu can only
use Moonbounce when the moon is visible to both ends. Troposcatter
works just about anytime, anywhere. The change in permittivity at the
top of the toposphere will actually bounce a tiny portion of the
microwave signal back down quite reliably. You can get about 600
miles that way. But you need the sort of big dish, and tens of
kilowatts to do it reliably. Only the military could really afford to
use it.
No, the article specifically stated that it was moonbounce and gave a
DOD rig designation, along with a remark that it was unreliable and a pain
to keep running, especially as they had a limited schedule for contact.
(For the radio intelligence ships, the goal would be to get their
intercepts to NSA headquarters at Fort Detrick in Maryland with as few
intermediaries as possilble).
Somewhere else, Monitoring Times I think, there was a description of
a Washington, DC - Pearl Harbor moonbounce link, so it got used
for fixed point connections, too. Given the expense, this sort of
stuff was probably only used by the highest priority traffic in the
DOD teletype network (AUTODIN?). Encrypted up the yazoo and anybody
who knew about it had their lips sewn shut.
Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)
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