Re:Space Hackers Prepare to Reboot 35-Year-Old Spacecraft
by jacquesm on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @10:53AM
(#7772821)
Sure they do. In fact, the microwave band was used for the longest time by HAMs because there was no known application for it, they pretty much pioneered it and dishes were the antennas of choice for those frequencies.
Doing a 1/4 wave trackable parabolic dish for something a little under 3m wavelength is very much achievable (and is not even close to microwave frequencies, 3m is huge!). If you want better efficiency you could use a larger dish but I think that it would be easier to up the power on the transmitter than it would be to make a dish 4 times that surface that rigidly tracks an object in LEO. That's quite the little bit of hardware engineering you'd have to do there. Even a few degrees 'off' would likely ruin the signal so precision is key and a large dish catches a lot of wind.
http://www.g3pho.free-online.co.uk/microwaves/history.htm
Doing a 1/4 wave trackable parabolic dish for something a little under 3m wavelength is very much achievable (and is not even close to microwave frequencies, 3m is huge!). If you want better efficiency you could use a larger dish but I think that it would be easier to up the power on the transmitter than it would be to make a dish 4 times that surface that rigidly tracks an object in LEO. That's quite the little bit of hardware engineering you'd have to do there. Even a few degrees 'off' would likely ruin the signal so precision is key and a large dish catches a lot of wind.
The amateur radio bands go all the way to 1mm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_allocat...