MoonBounce Serenade

I am proud to be part of the MIMProject.org atrist group and as we are specialized on technological art forms, my engineering hobby meets my art hobby quite often.

So it happened, that when we were asked to represent Estonia at the EBU annual Art's Birthday event on January 17'th, we decided to create something different.

Therefore, on January 17'th 2014 at 19.40-20.00UTC, we are about to create a largest music delay device ever attempted! And to accomplish this, we have teamed up with radio amateurs across the world and using the object no larger than .. our Moon! 

Simply put, the pieces of music will be transmitted to the moon using one of the most powerful 2.32GHz amateur transmitters for that purpose in existence, what just happens to be located in Estonia, at ES5PC (radio amateur callsign). The transmitter looks like this:

Moon will reflect the signal back and after traveling more than 768 000 km roundtrip, it will be received at the listening station of DL0SHF in Germany, where it is relayed back to us over internet, at . The receiver looks like this:

This will make the whole setup a huge 2.7sec delay line with some added effects (lot of noise and distortion..).

The catch? Moon is incredibly poor reflector for radio waves, so the signal will be attenuated by 281dB. If this number does not look too terrifying, lets represent it the other way: the signal arrives back 1258925411794167214239541063.958 times weaker ...

For those interested to listen how it all turns out, the live feed to the EBU show can be reached at http://klassikaraadio.err.ee/kuula and the time to listen is January 17'th 2014, at 19.40-20.00UTC