An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon

3 comments

• drmpeg11 minutes ago
  Previous post.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45790672">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45790672</a>
• infinitewars1 hour ago
  Wild hardware flex for a garage project. Reverse-engineering the Pi 5&#x27;s MIPI to push 5.6 Gbps from custom MASH sigma-delta ADCs to a Lattice ECP5 FPGA to the Raspberry Pi is serious engineering. The idea that the RF receiver looks like a &quot;camera&quot; to the Pi while the transmitter is a &quot;display&quot; is super creative. Getting a 1.5 kW, 240-antenna EME array for $2,499 is actually cheap for something like this.<p>Their standalone 4-antenna tiles (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moonrf.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moonrf.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;</a>) show off some killer apps, like 30 fps spatial RF visualization and NEON-optimized drone video interception.<p>I&#x27;m rolling my eyes at the &quot;Agentic Transceiver&quot; part, though. It is highly doubtful that an onboard AI casually writes, debugs, and compiles a real-time C app with analog video color sync recovery and decode in ten minutes.
  • jcalvinowens29 minutes ago
    &gt; Getting a 1.5 kW, 240-antenna EME array<p>It says 1W TX power per antenna. So the 240 antenna array which draws 1500W has a transmit power of 240W.
    • HNisCIS28 minutes ago
      EIRP. There&#x27;s some gain involved.
      • jcalvinowens7 minutes ago
        I think they&#x27;re claiming the actual transmit power is 240W (23.8 dBW), and the EIRP is 63.1 dBW.<p>I am sort of skeptical of the claimed gain... even at 6GHz, you need a 2-meter parabolic reflector to get 40dB, the array is 1&#x2F;10th that diameter. EDIT: Ignore this second paragraph I misread the spec page.
        • mrtnmcc5 minutes ago
          The MoonRF array is a full 1 meter diameter as shown on the page
          • jcalvinowens4 minutes ago
            I&#x27;m asleep and I misread that as 10cm. Thanks.
  • HNisCIS52 minutes ago
    I&#x27;m struggling to understand the signal chain or antenna architecture here. If those two MAX chips are 2829s this would be 2x2 mimo per tile but I&#x27;m not super familiar with that product line and the PCB layout looks like a 4x4 setup.<p>And yeah, the agentic stuff is dumb, I&#x27;ve played a ton with doing low level SDR work on Opus 4.6 and it&#x27;s truly ass.<p>Also, the &quot;can&#x27;t radar, plz don&#x27;t ITAR&quot; is horseshit. Some basic fw tweaks and you could get this to be, at the very least, a sweet FMCW setup.
• diimdeep1 hour ago
  Cool, how full array compares to the single antenna placed on Starlink satellite ?