I am playing with a hoaxer on another site - He's really hasn't got much to offer, but he suggested that the Luna Landing footage could have been beamed from Earth to the Moon, bounced back and picked up for transmission

I know I know lol - But this did spark a thought bubble for me - What sort of power would you need to transmit colour TV images to the Moon, bounce them back for re-broadcast on Earth. And did that sort of transmission power exist in 1969

The Apollo television signals were fairly weak, so the amount of power is not the issue. The main issue is the mechanism for repeating them back to Earth. You would have to land a repeater on the Moon.

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And have another in lunar orbit at the same time.

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AND hide the original broadcast from Earth.

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The CSM High gain Antenna used to beam TV pictures on the S-Band frequency was rated between 10 and 20 Watts, mostly operating at around 12 Watts. (From a Bellcom 1969 Apollo 10 report)

The nominal signal strength decided for Lunar Transmission was also at 10 Watts (though the LM antenna on Apollo 11 was significantly weaker...I dont have the figures ready).

In all cases the size of the receiving antenna had a direct influence on the picture quality. Simply look at the DVD available from www.honeysucklecreek.net (or through me, send a PM for costs) to compare the various changes in quality from each of the 3 active Rx sites.

Over on the yahoogroups apollohoax site, Mike Dinn who was a senior technician/engineer at both Honeysuckle Creek, and Tidbinbilla Trackings stations devised an easy to read graph showing what was necassary to achieve a fake lunar sourced signal. For all intent and purpose this method is highly unlikely given the LEO objects required to pull off such a stunt.

I believe what your friend is talking about us something called EME for earth-moon-earth, or "moonbounce" which is sometimes done by ham operators using the moon as simply a big dumb repeater, by firing signals off of it.

It's difficult to do, and even harder to do reliably. If you wanted to do it in a way that would be able to give a reliable steady picture you'd need very powerful equipment. And how would you hide the transmissions *from* earth? (as had been mentioned)

it would be difficult to do this without worrying about that. Simply "bouncing" the signals off would make them appear to come from the whole moon, not a single location. Variance in the shape of the moon could cause "ghosting" and other image problems.

In practice, I am not sure there are any examples of video being successfully transmitted by this method. Much less video which is proported to be genuine.

And then theres still that pesky problem of somehow sending high power signals to the moon without being noticed. You would probably need to send megawatts of power to get a decent video return.

When amateurs do it, they are limited to 1500 watts. With this, even with massive antenna arrays and a lot of effort, its tough to get an actual signal through. Just the carrier wave is considered a success

Thanks for the replies guys - I must admit I had a senario similar to Drbuzzo in my head when I was writing this thread. I know from the laser reflector tests they do with the Moon from time to time just how hard it is to hit anything with precision, or get anything vaguley like a decent signal back.

So in my mind to get anything of the quality of the Moon footage would be double plus tough

Another thing to remember is places like Bochum Observatory in Germany independently picked up the S-Band signal during the missions. They also recorded them, along with video for Apollo, and have done so since October 1957.

In practice, I am not sure there are any examples of video being successfully transmitted by this method. Much less video which is proported to be genuine.

EME or moonbounce is limited to narrow bandwidth signals like Morse code, voice, and teletype transmitted at frequencies lower than Apollo's S-band radio and television. The motion of the moon and the roughness of the lunar landscape would disrupt reflected short wavelength S-band signals. If you did manage to bounce a video signal off the moon, you probably wouldn't see it for the extended periods we see in the Apollo video sequences.

MG1962A, the general problem with this form hoax argument is that it is not really an argument. Conspiracy theorists will suggest a possibility such as, "the radio and television signals could have been bounced off the moon," and then will expect you to prove that suggestion impossible. Although it is fun to debunk such suggestions, in the end you learn nothing about what really happened.

To discover what really happened, one must investigate the world, of course. The conspiracy theorist doesn't want to leave the confines of his bedroom, however, and instead "investigates" little more than his private speculations and imaginations.

In addition to the problems with Moon-bounce that others have laid out, you have another biggie.

During the coast to (or from) the Moon, the Apollo stack was not lined up with the Moon. The antennas tracking the mission had to aim for where the spacecraft was, not at the Moon.

Since the some of the dish antennas had directional accuracy on the order of a fraction of a degree, you couldn't just "point the antenna at the Moon" and expect to pick up the signals during the entire mission.

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"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Think about how many millions of dollars communications companies spend each year on designing, building, launching, and maintaining satellites to broadcast signals from earth to the satellites and back. Even with today's technology, doing this consistently, efficiently, and economically is a very neat trick.

Had the technology to use the moon as a reflector existed in 1969, meeting those three criteria as would be necessary for a hoax, wouldn't the communications companies have glommed onto it by now?

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I must admit I had a senario similar to Drbuzzo in my head when I was writing this thread.

Oh I see; I misinterpreted "bounce." Yes, I see now where the concern over transmission power comes from. You'd need a lot of it in order to get a usable signal bounced back from the lunar surface itself.

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Well, there's a difference between feasibility and commercial viability. Hypothetically, it might have been possible to use a lunar bounce for the hoax but have power and reliability problems that made it uneconomical for routine use.

Besides, the Moon has this nasty habit of moving around all the time, and only being on one side of the planet at any given moment.

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"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

I doubt that it would be possible to make that stunt.
Even if you could manage to send with enough power and without someone take any notice from it, the moon still is an awful reflector.
Its not flat. Its a very bumpy sphere.
The signal would be spread all around, with only a very little usable signal coming back at you.
This "signal" would come from any surface point of the moon and would underlie a constant changing signal strength because of signal amplifications, when signals overlap in a positive way and signal erasement when they overlap in a negative way. This dependent of where you are and where you point your antenna.

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Mike Dinn doesn't happen to know the current whereabouts of the Marantz 9120 power amplifiers used in those tracking stations, does he? I've done my best to track them down, but couldn't find any trace after Apollo. Lindsay doesn't know what happened to them afterwards.

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The bottom line for the whole moon hoax business is that the technology necessary to adequately fake the moon landings is at least as comparable with the technology necessary to actually just land on the moon.

Reading some of the theories, I wonder what they find unbelievably difficult about just shooting yourself towards the moon.

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Being a HAM myself I have known of EME contacts for many years.
It's not the power of the amplifier, it's the gain of the antenna.
If you look at the link below you will see the wattages used by several people for EME transmissions. One of them is a mere 35 watts. You are not going to disturb the neighbors with that low of power.

http://web.telia.com/~u87120967/emegallery.htm

It's definitely possible in my book.

It's definitely possible in my book.

Thanks for the link to that page of QSL cards. It looks like most if not all of those contacts are CW (Morse code). It is possible to detect bounced signals like that that are only a few hertz wide, but that may not scale up to the Apollo FM video, which was up to 2 MHz wide, or even more factoring in the sidebands. I have come across accounts of voice and teletype--only a few kilohertz wide, but nothing wider. The signal-to-noise ratio is much lower with the wider bandwidth video.

Video demodulators need a good signal in order to lock on to the video signal. The human ear is much more forgiving in picking out beeps buried in static.

Also, as I understand it, the varying roughness of the surface and the fact that the earth and moon are constantly changing their orientations relative to each other means that EME communications tends to be fleeting, with the signals fading in and out.

Exactly!! - It is fun watching this thread evolve - Maybe we cant help ourselves, even though we know the truth, everyone is having fun throwing around ways you might bounce a beam anyway

The whole radio signal telemetry issue with Hoax Belivers, is most simply put as, thier response to the evidence that the video signals came from the moon.

So they do thier outright most to reject the evidence, by placeing some sort of repeater, etc, at the moon.

This goes directly to the mind set of a Hoax Beliver. They will reject and find a way around anything that contradicts their belief system. No matter how good the evidence is to the contrary.

The Telemetry proves signals came from the moon, and the orbiters around the moon. So now they have to 'bouce' signals, or explain it away some other way, or get hostile about it.

There is a term for this sort of mental instability. It's called Denial.

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