S band weapon against Apollo HB's

[R.A.F.]

'

I don't know if that is what R.A.F. meant from his post.

Heck, I don't even know what my point was...it says that right in the post.

I don't know, that's what I took from your post.

See above....

[Gillianren]

"Maintaining" something can be faked is meaningless. I think that's the primary argument being made here. You can say, "yes, but that could have been faked" all you like. At the end of the day, you have to show both how it was faked and that it was. Until both of those are covered, it's only reasonable to assume that it was real.

[Glom]

"Maintaining" something can be faked is meaningless. I think that's the primary argument being made here. You can say, "yes, but that could have been faked" all you like. At the end of the day, you have to show both how it was faked and that it was. Until both of those are covered, it's only reasonable to assume that it was real.

And besides, conspiracy theorists use traffic cones as goal posts. They will dismiss ANYTHING you offer as proof as something potentially fakeable.

[R.A.F.]

...conspiracy theorists use traffic cones as goal posts.

I am so glad I was not drinking when I read this....it is "spit take" worthy.

[sts60]

You're missing the point.
...
Simply speculating that NASA could have done something means nothing.

And I still maintain that none of that is impossible to simulate. Very difficult and extremely unlikely.

To put it bluntly, who cares what you "maintain"? You have no evidence whatsoever for any alternative, no apparent idea how it could be credibly done, and no explanation at all for the actual ALSEP program.

I have proof. You have a very slight bit of idle handwaving. Just saying "it could have been faked" doesn't offer an alternative that lessens the conclusive evidentiary value of ALSEP.

But for an organisation that was actually able to send men to the surface of the moon and back on multiple occaisions; they would not find it impossible.

Well, it's already been pointed out, but you just debunked your own claim.

[Sardonicone]

Everything is faked. Even this post.

[KA9Q]

Well from the video the amateurs never seemed to receive more than a few snippets and lost all communication when the CSM went behind the moon. The voices received were only from the CSM.

Hams would only have been able to receive S-band from the moon when PM (phase modulation) was used. The CSM transmitted PM all the time, but the LM had only one transmitter that could transmit only PM or FM at any one time. FM was needed for wideband telemetry, tape recorder dumps and video, so it would not have been possible to receive the LM during the EVAs, for example.

Why? Because FM is a "nonlinear" modulation method. Although it can provide an excellent demodulated signal with relatively little power, the flip side is that it produces nothing at all unless the signal is above a certain threshold. For Apollo 11, which used only the S-band dish on the LM to avoid spending time deploying the umbrella S-band antenna (though they did carry it), reaching that threshold required a gigantic receiving antenna; the movie "The Dish" is about the use of the 64m Parkes radio telescope in Australia to receive the Apollo 11 TV transmissions from Eagle. A 64m antenna is obviously beyond the capability of your average ham.

The PM signal is more like AM - amplitude modulation, a linear modulation method. You can pick off the voice subcarrier and receive it with a narrowband receiver that would not require a lot of incoming signal power. With FM, it's all-or-nothing; you don't have the option of selecting just the voice; you need a signal strong enough to get the video as well, and that's just impractical on a ham scale.

One person, Larry Baysinger, did receive the **VHF** voice signal from Neil Armstrong's PLSS transmitter. I've confirmed that this was possible by running the link budgets myself. This was a remarkable achievement given that Armstrong was transmitting only a few hundred milliwatts intended only to reach the VHF receiver on the LM that would then relay to earth. Baysinger heard both Armstrong and Aldrin because Aldrin's PLSS was configured to transmit to Armstrong's, which in turn relayed both their voices to the LM over a single link. It was done this way because the original design of the LM comm system assumed only one crew member would be on the surface at a time, and this allowed both to do an EVA without changing the LM.

For Baysinger to succeed, everything had to work just right. He had built a large VHF antenna out of lumber and chicken wire of the type often used for amateur radio astronomy. The moon was just setting in Kentucky where he was, so he benefitted from a temporary enhancement of the signal that occurs when the moon is setting. One component of the signal from the moon goes direct to his antenna, and another component bounces off the ground and then to his antenna, doubling the total received power. This isn't always the case; as the moon slowly moves, sometimes the two components cancel out of phase so you would expect to hear (and do hear) very slow fading in the signal strength. This trick is often used by hams doing moonbounce with marginal equipment.

Baysinger's feat was written up in a few local newspapers but it is not nearly as well known as the S-band reception by Dick Knadle and others. It really should be better known, and he should get a lot of credit for his success.

[Vonstadt]

The truly sad part about HB's is that all of the claims made by the conspiracy folks can be explained and learned simply by doing some very basic web research and god forbid book reading :P

Just some folks like the attention, are too stubborn in their own ignorance or just are too lazy to look it up. I fear even when we go back there are going to be those HB's that will come up with even more CGI driven fantasies and off the wall explainations to how the remaining Apollo artifacts got placed other than the actual missions. Even as a freshman in high school i learned about our unmanned 'moon bases' (the reflector mirrors left behind) in Martin Caidin's novelization of 'The Final Countdown'. It was a throw away line about not finding them with a laser to check their position when the crew of the Nimitz was trying to verify where or in the story 'when' they were.

Made me curious to find out if that was true or not and I looked it up and was even thrilled years later to see Mythbusters do that very thing on their show as i watched with my daughter.

The facts are there, folks just have to see for themselves, and sadly many choose not to do so

[Glom]

Or a moment's thought. Many HB arguments aren't even logically coherent, let alone factually rigorous.

[goodnightsnookieukums]

yet again nasa could have soft landed a unmanned S band repeater probe on the moon, or,flown the entire Apollo 11 lunar hardware stack unmanned via radio control to the moon and landing its LM equipeed to be an S,band repeater..given the extreme trickiness of doing,that as well as secretly launching a secret geostatioanry repeater sattelite, ocams razor says by
far the simplest easiest route was to sctually do the real manned moon missions, which of course is the fact they did.

By using the term "simpler" you ignore risk to human life.

[Solfe]

By using the term "simpler" you ignore risk to human life.

In saying risk, you have to admit that it was possible for humans to do it. If it was certain that they couldn't, there would be no risk at all.

[JayUtah]

By using the term "simpler" you ignore risk to human life.

No, systemic complexity analysis explicitly does not consider moral concerns or obligations. Try again.