[Scan-DC] receiving Spirit

[Mike Agner]

   Last nite, Andrew Layton wrote:
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Ok, I'll bite.  What would it take to pick up the signal from the Spirit 
probe on Mars?  Could you "homebrew" something with an old satellite dish, 
a scanner and a PC to decode it?
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   Given that the transmitter on Spirit is very low power and heavily 
encoded (notice I didn't say encrypted), I would think that the dish and 
amplifier would have to be really large to get a decent signal.  It's 
doable, but not by the average scannists.

   You will notice that the first pix from Sprirt were in black and 
white.  This is because it takes much less power to transmit a black and 
white picture than a color one (due to the larger bandwidth required).  I 
would also bet a heavy amount of encoded telemetry is also on the signal, 
which is no doubt compressed in some manner.   So whether you could receive 
the signal is one thing, but understanding the encoding might be a whole 
'nother question.

   73s  Mike