Empirical Earth · Radio & Long-Distance Signals

Moonbounce (EME) — pinging the Moon and timing the echo

The claim

“The Moon is small and nearby; the '384,000 km' figure is just globe dogma.”

What is true

Nothing about looking at the Moon tells you how far away it is. Distance is not something the eye can measure.

What is measured

Bounce a radio signal off the Moon and the echo returns in ~2.4–2.7 s, a light-speed round trip to a body ~384,000 km away.

What would show this is wrong

a Moon-bounce echo returning in much less than ~2.4–2.7 s.

Sources

  1. Earth–Moon–Earth (EME) communication. "Moonbounce" reflects radio off the Moon; the echo returns in ~2.4–2.7 s, placing the Moon ~384,000 km away at the speed of light. First achieved by the link
  2. Amateur Moon-bounce (EME) — bands, path loss, reflectivity. EME is worked on every amateur band from 50 MHz to 47 GHz (144 and 1296 MHz the most popular); the Moon reflects only about 6% of link
  3. EME equipment and the self-echo test. Stations use high-gain Yagi arrays (VHF/UHF) or parabolic dishes (microwave), a low-noise preamp at the feed and 100–1500 W; JT65 decodes ~28 dB below t link
  4. WSJT-X / JT65 — written by a Nobel physicist. The free WSJT-X suite, by Joseph H. Taylor Jr. (K1JT), 1993 Nobel laureate in Physics, generates and decodes the JT65/Q65 weak-signal modes that link
  5. First amateur EME contact, 1960. The Eimac Radio Club (W6HB, San Carlos, California) and the Rhododendron Swamp VHF Society (W1BU, Massachusetts) completed the first two-way amateur moonboun link
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