[Scan-DC] NASA's Mars probe

[Dave Emery]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 01:03:58PM -0500, Andrew Leyden wrote:
> 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?
> 

	If you are in to LARGE old satellite dishes, why yes. But not a
home backyard sized one - more like one of the big kind that sometimes
get surplussed by carriers when they shut down earthstations for
overseas traffic or the government when it shuts down stations to listen
to such (there are a half dozen such sites that have been put up for
sale over the years).

	I suspect that probably a good 32 or 50  foot dish with the
right X band feed would hear the signal from the high gain antenna,
though you are hardly talking scanner and PC type hardware here.

	And apparently some folks at Stanford in Ca have been successful
at seeing the signal from the rover with such a dish.

	There are various university and even private groups who have
acquired access to these old monster satellite dishes for SETI or
semi-pro radio astronomy experiments - one can be quite sure that at
least one or two of these groups is probably trying to look at the
downlink as we speak.


-- 
   Dave Emery N1PRE,  die@dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493