Trivia question #1: Who said that (To the Moon, Alice)?

Trivia question #2: What year did Gary K4AAQ say it was when he introduced this show?

We’re not answering those here. Watch (or listen to) the show.

In January, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) landed a ham radio station on the moon (along with some other stuff, we’re sure, but we have our priorities). Its one-watt transmitter sent some telemetry on 437.41 MHz, along with a cleverly embedded Morse code (not cw) signal, as received by these guys in the Netherlands, and partially decoded by this guy, with help from a few other very advanced hams (read the blog and comments). Best we can tell, it was just a little more advanced than OSCAR 1’s Hi Hi Hi back in 1961. But it still counts as the first freakin’ ham station on the moon. 🌜

The station has literally gone dark, as it slid into lunar night. 🌚 It’s not expected to survive, but we bet there’ll be some well equipped hams listening in a couple weeks, just to make sure.

How ‘well equipped’? Well, you need to make up about 40 dB of path loss, assuming you’ve got an excellent receiver. How do you do that? Big ass antenna. Nope… bigger.

Then Gary rambles on about the fate of HRN 506: How Can We Podcast With All This Light💡? That’s the show that nobody’s seen, because first YouTube, then Netflix, took it down until we fought to get it back up (and we won).

And finally, he talks about South Carolina’s unusual “First in the Nation” Presidential Primary, and the chat room confirms that what we’re doing here is very confusing. And once again what we thought would be a 10-minute show ran over an hour.

BTW, David W0DHG is out this week, teaching a First Aid class. We expect to be back next Sunday.