The moon was setting in Louisville KY when Baysinger made his recording, and that probably made the difference. When you track the moon (or a satellite) down to the horizon, you begin to pick up multipath reflections off the ground that add to or subtract from the direct signal. Many moonbounce hams have made contacts on the setting moon during the brief periods when the multipath enhances the signal above what it would be when the moon is high in the sky. Baysinger’s recording does exhibit a very slow fade; at times the signal is pretty much gone but at other times it’s quite readable though still very weak.

As I see it, while it’s impossible to rule out a sufficiently sophisticated hoax, Baysinger’s claim is entirely plausible and I don’t see anything right now to say that he couldn’t have done it.

There was, apparently, one guy somewhere in the US who set up an array of 48 Yagis, using a pair of truck beds as an antenna rotator, to work moonbounce on 2 m (144 MHz).

Edit to add: Just noticed that Michel (comment #55) was faster than I. But maybe the Skeptoid link will be helpful to some as well.

The discussions the NASA telemetry engineer (my grandfather) and these Italian fellows had was utterly and incredibly fascinating. He explained to them things that they had figured out, they explained to him some ideas he said he wish he had had himself.

I read in a book about the Soviet space program that mentioned every American mission was recorded – including telemetry signals.

Now that really begs a rather intriguing question. Remember the lost Apollo 11 telemetry tapes? The ones that had the original video signal embedded? Is it at all possible that the Russians have an archive of something that we don’t even have ourselves?

I wonder if anyone high up at NASA or in our State Department has asked them.

Flying Sardines (19) said: “Well, lets see we’ve got the photos, the moon rocks, thousands of historical records, the consistent accounts of all twelve (or really more like thirty) astronauts,”

24 men have been to the moon (including Apollos 8, 10 and 13, none of which landed on the moon). Remember that some of them got to go twice (Jim Lovell, for example, was either LMP or CMP of Apollo 8, and commander of Apollo 13).

Thanks.

24 – 30 same diff! Well, would you accept approximation? I just rounded up!

Twelve Moon-Walkers plus 6 “loneliest men on Earth” (CSM pilots) & the Apollo 13 trio plus those couple of dress rehearsals (8-10) & yes a few, David Scott, Jim Lovell, John Young (?) got to fly twice. Yeah if you count them twice it adds up to more & I should’ve allowed for that.

Anyhow could all those good & honourable men really be lying as the MHCTBers claim? Lying so flawlessly that they are never caught out despite constant interviews etc ..

What an absurd and offensive notion really.

Then there are the thousands of engineers, designers, builders, administrators, scientists and more involved. If it had been a hoax you would have to expect it to have been uncovered ages ago – in fact you just couldn’t manage to keep such a secret with that number of people. Oh & the Russians too .. and it was in their interest to expose any hoax. The MHCT is honestly just too absurd for words & I fail to see why anyone could believe it. Teh Stoopid it burns!

@ 28. IVAN3MAN AT LARGE Says:

Flying sardines:
Me: “Okay, this prove it to you?”
* Takes off MHCTBer’s helmet*
* Messy explosive decompression, blood freezing / boiling ensues *
[...]
That is a common misconception resulting from bad science-fiction stories:

Yeah, well its my fantasy & I can have bad science in it if I want too!

Its just more satisfying to think of that way. (Thinks of Total Recall decompresion FXT with Sibrel in place of Kohagen.)

I loved The Dish – great movie about a great radio-telescope. Okay, it may have a few scientific & historical inaccuracies but it was still a fun and pro-science movie well worth watching. IMHON.

BTW. Did the BA ever do a review of that?

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se

When my old scanner radio was still working, I hooked it up to two 50 cm pieces of metal threadwire from a hardware store and listened in to the ISS communicating with ground stations in Russia at 143.625 MHz when ISS was passing over my place. You can hear some recordings, as well as some recordings of signals of other sats with the same primitive setup, by clicking on the link in my name above.

When MIR was still in orbit, the signal sometimes came up on the police frequencies used in my area at that time. At one time, we heard a cop grumble to the central about “those damned Ruskies blabbing again!”

ISS communications at 143.625 MHz are unencoded, you just can plainly hear what they say (usually in Russian).

Radio transmissions are regularly used by amateur satellite trackers to determine orbits of satellites (e.g. newly launched militray satellites), including geostationary satellites

Thanks VE6AMG, keep the power on. And thanks Dr. Phil for bringing this memory back for me.

While I haven’t heard of any other radio amateurs eavesdropping on Apollo, there have been many examples of them monitoring Earth-orbiting satellites.
In 1957, Geoffrey Perry, a physics teacher at a British grammar school, who was also a radio amateur, monitored the transmissions from Sputnik 1. Throughout the 1960′s, Perry and successive classes of schoolboys, using only amateur radio equipment, maintained an extensive programme of monitoring Soviet satellites and determining their orbits.
Among Perry’s achievements was the discovery, independently of the US Government, of the existence of the USSR’s “secret” military launch site at Plesetsk, and a pretty accurate determination of its location. ( He tracked the orbits of some satellites, and concluded that they couldn’t possibly have been launched from either of the two known launch sites. )
This fact demonstrates the sheer stupidity of the conspiracy loonies’ claims about NASA having a “secret” launch site, and launching “secret” unmanned spacecraft! It would have been totally impossible to keep the existence of a launch site “secret” for more than five minutes!

May I say here that I’ve had the great honour and privilege of meeting three Apollo astronauts – Charlie Duke, Alan Bean and Fred Haise – and hope to meet Jim Lovell this week.

Do they even publish the ARRL Antenna Handbook anymore?

Don’t know, but I did share use of a copy back in the mid-90s (Radio Club at Uni).

It’s true you’ll never convince all the sceptics no matter what proof you come up with.

I think “sceptics” is the wrong word for Hoax Believers (HBs). A sceptic is typically open to persuasion by sufficient evidence. Nearly all HBs are simply not open to the possibility that the Apollo missions genuinely succeeded.

Sceptics are open to the possibility that they themselves might be wrong, and this certainly is not characteristic of HBs.

Well, lets see we’ve got the photos, the moon rocks, thousands of historical records, the consistent accounts of all twelve (or really more like thirty) astronauts,

24 men have been to the moon (including Apollos 8, 10 and 13, none of which landed on the moon). Remember that some of them got to go twice (Jim Lovell, for example, was either LMP or CMP of Apollo 8, and commander of Apollo 13).

Radio amateurs are very familiar with the radio communication technique called “moon bounce”, so it’s not to much trouble picking up a radio transmission from the Moon.

Well, it’s been quite a while since I read about the details, but IIRC the E-M-E path loss is more than 105 dB, so (assuming about 55 dB for moon – Earth) you’d still need plenty of antenna gain. Either that or the mother of all masthead preamps! After all, NASA did use some fairly substantial-sized dish antennas for the job.

There are many different accounts of their story, this one has a reasonable amount of details:
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0235a.shtml

One thing to note, I don’t believe it was mentioned in this article. The recording of the Russian with the sound of his heartbeat over the voice was considered to be faked because heartbeat telemetry is not sent in-band with audio transmissions, it’s on another frequency. But on the other hand, who knows what the Russians where doing, they had so many different branches of government doing work on competing spacecraft it’s not outside the realm of plausibility.