On Apr 14, 4:14*am, Alan Erskine wrote:
Does anyone know how many communications circuits the large deployable
parabolic antenna could manage? *There were voice, telemetry and video
circuits, but how many of each?

According to SETI, all sorts of communications (regardless of
frequency) can efficiently go to/from Earth, especially to/from that
extremely nearby moon, so I'd imagine those fancy NASA/Apollo
microwave antennas could manage as much bandwidth as anything we could
muster at that time, with very little loss of signal considering the
to/from path being perfectly clear.

Actually, the vast majority or terrestrial RF/EMF doesn't get outside
of our atmosphere, or at least not much past LEO unless it's of
microwaves and being directed or focused sufficiently, of which most
terrestrial microwaves are not.

Of course nowadays a compact, light weight and very energy efficient
laser communication beam would be just the ticket, with a focus of
roughly 2 km diameter at 384,000 km if that distance were necessary.
Otherwise a little wider laser beam communicator of something like a
hand held cellphone or satellite-phone configuration would be more
than sufficient for delivering an extremely wide bandwidth and
terrific data throughput once the extremely narrow channel is
established.

However, a tightly focused laser cannon method deployed in LEO could
get that intended target area down to a couple meters diameter for
that same 384,000 km distance. Now that's efficient communications.

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