media what died a'bornin'

[John Lawson]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:

>> From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at siconic.com>
>
> ---snip---
>> There was also a discussion about bouncing signals off the moon to create
>> a delay-line memory of sort.
>>
>> What if we were to preserve software by encoding it as audio and bouncing
>> it off the moon?  I figure we could probably save a few old programs that
>> way :)
>>
>
> Hi
> You'd need a few different frequencies. The round trip to
> the moon and back is only 2.6 seconds. It would be much more
> reliable if there was a repeater on the moon otherwise the
> signal would be weak.
> Dwight

   You'd need a way to overcome the severe phase-rotation and libration 
fading artifacts that make Earth-Moon-Earth reflection-mode communications 
a peculiar (and rather frustrating) hobby for us Hams.

   Folks use large, high-gain (10 meter > up) dishes, and legal-limit 
output powers (1500Watts at 450 MHtz) and specialized communication 
algorithms, like phase-coherent Morse Code, in order to actually send 
'intelligence' - even using a keyed unmodulated carier, the throughput is 
byte-per-minutes.

   Have to use a whole lotta wait-states for the EME buffer...


Cheers

John