An unexpected use for a cardboard box: listening to the moon

[2016-10-29 Sat 11:37:30] speaker: Roland Turner event: GeekcampSG 2016

Amateur radio was there at the start of space exploration

Regaining control of IC3

Figure out an intermediate steps to get to earth-moon-earth communication

• listen to a satellite orbiting the moon
• existing projects use a dish which is harder to setup due to regulations
• a cardboard box based horn was used for the AO4 satellite
• try using that for the LRO satellite around the moon

Is it feasible?

• determine the amount of signal power and noise power
  • for each stage of the transmission/receive
• system components also introduce noise
• ends up with a SNR of 0.32 which is too low to detect
• instead of covering the fill 5MHz of the signal, limit to only 1MHz to increase the SNR to 1.58

The cardboard box antenna captures more signal from the source and filters out noise