Radio amateurs will attempt an Earth-Moon-Earth (EME, or “moonbounce”) transmission on January 10, using the 60 foot diameter TLM-18 dish on the former “Project Diana” site, now part of the InfoAge Science History Museum in New Jersey. This month’s event marks the 70th anniversary of Project Diana. It was on the InfoAge site, then a part of Fort Monmouth, that the US Army’s Project Diana team on January 10, 1946, first received radio signals bounced from the moon.
During the anniversary event, the TLM-18 reactivation team, consisting of volunteers from the InfoAge Science History Museum, the Ocean Monmouth Amateur Radio Club (OMARC), and Princeton University will transmit on 23 centimeters from N2MO, the OMARC club station, adjacent to the dish that offers 35 dBi gain at 465 MHz. The former US Army tracking dish was used as a ground station for the TIROS I and II weather satellites and for Project Vanguard, which led to the launch of Vanguard 1, the second US satellite, in 1958. The dish was demilitarized in the 1970s.
Daniel Marlow, K2QM, an InfoAge board member who teaches physics at
Princeton, plans to use the dish as a radio telescope to see the 21
centimeter radiation from the Milky Way. But he also wants to observe
radio pulsars, and since that activity can be performed at 70
centimeters, the TLM-18 dish is being made available to the Amateur
Radio community for EME at 432 MHz on a secondary basis. Project Diana
occupied the building housing N2MO. — Thanks to InfoAge and Martin Flynn, W2RWJ