In July of 1969 a Louisvillian by the name of Larry Baysinger accomplished an amazing feat. He independently detected signals from the Apollo 11 astronauts on the lunar surface. Fortunately, his accomplishments were recorded and promptly published in the Louisville Courier-Journal in an article entitled “Lunar Eavesdropping: Louisvillians hear moon walk talk on homemade equipment”. The story appeared in the July 23, 1969 issue of the paper.
Baysinger was a technician for Louisville’s WHAS 840 AM radio. The story garnered some attention for Baysinger. He was interviewed by the Collins Corporation who was very impressed that anyone could detect the Apollo signals with home-built equipment.
Baysinger told me that the Apollo lunar eavesdropping project arose because in the late 1960’s he was an amateur radio astronomer with an interest in NASA, in astronomy, and in other such things that were hot topics at a time when America was on the verge of landing its first men on the moon. He experimented with satellite tracking and capturing pictures of Earth transmitted from weather satellites.
These interests and efforts led to the idea that he might independently verify the information that NASA had been providing about the Apollo program. Could he get unedited, unfiltered information about the Apollo 11 landing by eavesdropping on the radio signals transmitted from the lunar surface?
Most of all, successfully detecting a transmission from the lunar surface would be a great technical accomplishment. Various local experts said that it could not be done.
On the night of the Apollo 11 eavesdropping effort, Baysinger said he and Rutherford had to essentially “bore-sight” the antenna on the moon – aim it by getting behind it and sighting it like a gun. This was difficult since the weather was cloudy and the moon not easily visible. The antenna, which was originally built as a radio telescope to look at naturally occurring radio sources in space, had a motorized steering mechanism but it had to be manually guided. Its “beam” or “field of view” was such that, once pointed at the moon, it could be let go for a little while, but pretty soon it would have to be re-aimed because the Earth’s rotation caused the moon to drift out of the field and the signal to be lost. In fact, this was one piece of evidence that, once the receiver started picking up Apollo 11 signals, the signals were indeed from the moon – if the antenna was not kept aimed at the moon, the signal disappeared.
Baysinger’s wife and daughter watched the Apollo 11 landing on TV while Baysinger and Rutherford listened via Baysinger’s equipment. The signal on the home-built equipment came through approximately 5-10 seconds earlier than the signal on TV.
The signal the lunar eavesdropping equipment picked up was noisy, but Baysinger says you could hear what was going on.
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