An amateur radio beacon will fly to the moon and back

Also called the 4M, Manfred Memorial Moon Mission will travel to the Moon and hopefully back to Earth aboard the Chinese Long March 3C rocket. Its payload will include a JT65 beacon that will transmit shortly after departure on the 2m amateur radio band. Transmission will include the callsign LX0OHB as well as various info: elapsed time from launch, power supply parameters, temperature and dosimeter readings etc. Transmitter is 1W output into L/4 monopole.

For those that want to monitor the beacon, here’s the required info:

– TX freq: 145.980MHz, +/- 2.9KHz variation depending on temperature, +1KHz/-2.2KHz Doppler shift
– departure time: October 23 2014, 17:59 UTC, expected on air at 19:17 UTC
– special JT65 software version from here.
– extra info here.

More details about the project, on the AMSAT-UK website.