Lessons learned from the Blue Ghost mission, you don’t need very high-end equipment to receive signals from missions to the moon. This time we used an old 60cm TV offset dish where we placed a 5 turn LHCP helix in the feed point.

The full RF path is as follows: 5 turn LHCP Helix → Osmocom S-band bandpass filter → NooElec wideband LNA → 4 meter Aircell 7 → BiasT → USRP B200 mini.

With the help of Nasa Horizons we could determine the location where to point the dish so Artemis-II would pass the beam of the antenna. This first night we used a the following fixed position, 195 Azimuth and 8 Elevation.

After some initial tests with the great STRF tools we where sure the setup was receiving signals and now the waiting began. It would be a long night.

But finally around 01:30 a very strong wide band signal (+/- 5MHz) was detected and I could even receive it on this small setup. Around 02:00 (04:00 local) it was time to get some sleep and we let the observation running. This morning we saw that around 03:30 we could see a residual carrier, see the below rfplot.

Sources:
STRF at github.
NASA Horizons.

Blue Ghost Mission 1 to the Moon.

Would it be possible with a minimal setup to receive signals from this mission to the Moon.

With the help of @eelkevisser I was finally able the receive Blue Ghost. A 5 turn LHCP helix on a broomstick (Blue Ghost used LHCP) into a Nooelec wide-band LNA, sysmocom S-band filter, Nooelec down converter and Airspy R2. Pretty awesome.

The antenna was pointed at a fixed location and I used the STRF tools to record the signals over a long period when the satellite was passing.

Doppler measurement:

Source: Blue Ghost Mission 1