Try a google search for Project MoonRay
Excerpt From 
www.nitehawk.com/rasmit/nick.html

Details about Project Moonray
Nick thought of the idea of putting an amateur repeater on the moon in
1965 while the Apollo manned lunar explorations were taking place. He
met with Owen Garriott, W5LFL, who was an astronaut in training. Owen
was scheduled to go to the moon on the forthcoming Apollo 18 mission.
Nick gave this amateur project the name Moonray, which was short for
moon relay. The idea that he proposed to NASA and was accepted by them
was to build a package small enough to fit under the seat of the Lunar
Rover vehicle. It would fit in a space vacated by the exchange of
batteries with fuel cells. Hopefully, Owen would be the driver of this
vehicle and he would have been the person to erect the Moonray package
on the surface of the moon. There was to have been a connector on the
Moonray package so that Owen could plug in his spacesuit headset and
make a few contacts with hams on Earth. He would have then left the
assembled package on the moon operating as an open amateur repeater. 

Nick planned to build a thermonuclear powered (50 WATT DC output)
Plutonium 235 fueled unit with a half-life of 97 years. It was to be a 5
pound repeater package with a 432 MHz uplink receiver and 1296 MHz 3.5
watt output downlink transmitter. The repeater was to accept all
modulation modes at the input and linearly translate these to the
downlink transmitter. The repeater also was to have contained several
interesting amateur experiments including a laser receiver, a slow-scan
color TV system giving gross cloud cover pictures of the earth several
times a day, and a 32 channel telemetry link to transmit a variety of
experimental and housekeeping data. 
The call SS in Morse code was to be the identifier and had been
allocated and approved by the FCC. NASTAR's ground station was to be the
secondary control link to turn the repeater on or off as needed, and the
giant dish at Arecibo was to be the primary control in emergency or
during unexpected repeater malfunctions. 

Unfortunately, Congress cut off funding to NASA for all future Apollo
missions and Project Moonray was shelved. 




Mark Senk | [log in to unmask] 
412 386-6513
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/