AF 447 Search to resume

[JD-EE]

On the MOON???

Er, WeeWinkyWillie's #2 son needs to look into a transmission mode known as "Moon Bounce" to get an idea of the path loss between the Earth and the Moon. He also needs to look into "The Dark Side Of The Moon". Too often people think of that as the face away from the Earth. T'aint so, McGee. The dark side of the Moon is the side facing away from the Sun. So any transponder on the Moon would have to be passive, have a 14+ day battery pack, or else be carefully sited on a mountain peak very near one of the Moon's poles. And this has to be done in an era when we cannot repeat what a certain now 80 year old gentleman did on July 20th 1969. So servicing such a unit (batteries die) or installing such a unit at one of the poles would be a major undertaking.

My understanding is that the Iridium satellites are pretty heavily loaded at present, usually by government agencies, usually with undisclosed names. That is, however, one of the very few global coverages that exists.

Buoys need to be sited every 100 miles or so all over the globe. That would include portions of the globe in 24 hour darkness during major portions of the year. I did indeed play with Google Earth a little to discover that the routes, Perth to South America, all feature at least some time over the Antarctic ice sheet. Coverage down there would require something fancy to get through the winter, or else satellite coverage that would have to be dedicated to this purpose 24x7 lest it be preoccupied with other traffic when a plane has problems. <shrug> It can be done. How much would a dedicated data dump channel on Iridium cost per year? Maybe it's worth the cost.

Another thing that concerns me comes from my college days in the Detroit area. I was a ham radio operator. And I worked aurora bounce around the country when we had some good (lamentably at the time rare) auroras. This was on 50Mhz. I was told at the time it also affected the 144 MHz ham band. Flying through the area under the aurora is probably a radio numbing experience for most any frequency.I wonder if anybody has performed this experiment. What frequency would be needed to penetrate the murk? Fortunately, the contrived bit of my scenario is presuming a plane would have trouble in that area. At a guess the weather at aircraft altitudes is pretty benign over the poles. Any corrections to my guess?