Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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I think we'll need to put your dish on steroids before it's likely to hear that.
Or maybe, Viagra! - :eek:

Also, don't they super-cool their front ends?
I know I get upset when I pour a Coke in my lap, so that doesn't sound like fun. -:D
 
None of the info on that web site seems to be current (so far as I noticed)
So it's possible that through improvements they moved from a 1.8m to a 1.0m dish, or NOT.
Perhaps the larger dish is partly responsible for the improved signal.

Update 7-January-2006
Received MRO again this evening, signals were about 4 to 5dB above the noise, and copyable in SSB. The MRO was 69593573 miles away which is 25 million miles further away than when I first copied a signal from it! The photos below show some close-ups of the LHC feed horn with depolarising screws, and the feed horn mounted on the feed arm of the 1m dish.

Still, I found this to be the most amusing:
The MRO has a 3 meter diameter dish antenna driven by a 100 Watt TWTA to transmit signals to Earth - this means that the signal coming in our direction is of the order of 4.2 mega watts of RF.
 
The 4.2 mega watts of ERP caught my attention too, Anole. That is one heck of a spot beam! Guess this would explain why NASA refers to it as the High Gain.

Since the UK hams were getting 6-8dB of usable signal with a 1 meter dish, seems to me that with a bit of tweaking, we should be able to get better than 0dB with a pizza pan ... right? :eureka

Found some interesting stuff regarding the MRO's communications systems in Lunar and Planetary Science XXXVIII (warning, .pfd format)

Smith, you are linking to and quoting from a different page than the one I cited in my original post ... but you already know that, don't ya? :)
 
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