Moon Bounce or EME

It wasn't as as climactic as the moon landing, but still signifigant in radio land. The technique is known today as Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) or moonbounce. Signals of very high power are transmitted from antennas pointed at the moon 238,000 miles away. The moon reflects some of the signal and bounces the radio waves back to Earth to be received by listeners about 2.7 seconds later. The moon only reflects back about 7 % of the signal during a Moonbounce so this is harder than it sounds.

On January 10, 1946 , John H. DeWitt Jr. of the US Army Signal Corps bounced a 112 MHz (2.6 meters) radar beam off the moonThis was the first EME transmission. John was from Nashville and had been a Ham since 1921. He joined the US Army Electronic Branch in 1942. Two years later, he became director of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Belmar, New Jersey.

He actually beat out another radioman trying for the same acheivement in Hungary. Zoltan Bay suceeded in his first EME a mere two weeks later with radar of 2.5 m on february 6th. The first scientifically useful radar echoes, however, were those made by Frank Kerr and Shain. On November 1947. Kerr, shain and the crew at CSIRO demonstrated with a 15m echo that the short period variations of Earths rotation were caused by the vibration of the moon.

DeWitt just took that eperience and developed radar for locating mortars and directing counterfire. http://www.elite.net/~k7xq/eme.html He later returned to Nashville and broadcasting, eventually becoming president of commercial radio station WSM.

Radio on the Moon

It was the Apollo 11 Mission on July 20th, 1969. Most of us were at home staring at our TV sets. Those that were heard some of this: Apollo Audio

This audio of course had to pass thru a two-way radio. Radio waves can travel without an atmosphere, sound cannot. That made radio a must for space. Radio ham, Jack Yanosov and his co-workers at RCA in Camden had designed and built the radio system for the Apollo 11 craft and monitored it throughout the mission.

Most people remember the "one small step for man" line, but those were not the first spoken on the moon, nor the first spoken after Neil Armstrong opened the hatch and stepped out. His first words actually were "OK Houston, I'm on the porch." It was a few seconds later as his feet reached the surface that he said his most misquoted lines. More here.

Those words were sent by via VHF radio using Amplitude Modulation with a radio that was designed by Jack Yanosov. He had originally began his career on the RCA assembly line, and eventually worked his way up to be a lead project engineer. As he explained it, he didn't want to be on an assembly line all his life. So he enrolled at the Temple Technical School and took electronics engineering. He received his Associates degree in 1953 and was promptly drafted by the US Army for the Korean War.
His degree and background got him off the front lines and into more technical work. He had the right aptitude and the military gave him additional electronics training at Ft. Monmouth. He eventually was stationed at the White Sands Proving Ground, a missile range in New Mexico. It was there that he started getting involved in ham radio. He took his exam and received his amateur license with the calls KN2KEF.

After being honorably discharged, he went to Drexel University. He got his degree and drove back across the Delaware river for a Job at RCA at their Defense Communications Systems Division more than a few steps up from the assembly line. The NASA bio is here.