I lived in an apartment complex as a young adult. I used to load up the rain gutters as my HF antenna. I might not have been the biggest signal on the air, but it did make contacts.
Did anyone know of this earlier? This is my first time hearing of this and I’m bummed that I didn’t have time to get something set up to receive this. Not just any antenna can receive a 1w signal from the moon and the poor guy is about to be killed by the lunar night
I work at a large lab and probably could have made something happen. But yes, it's great that they sent this out to the HAMs. Was happy to see that some people managed to capture the signal
After my third Baofeng handheld [1], I finally had to get a "real" receiver. But the 3B's are still useful for additional listening stations and/or for friends.
—73
[1] The volume potentiometer becomes unreliable after regular on/offs. The major concern is that after a few years, some "steps" of volume randomly mutes (with no indication, you just don't hear the incoming).
Commercial portable: Nagoya NA-771 (beware clones)
Commercial fixed: Diamond X30, X50 or V2000 colinear.
With any upgraded antenna on a receiver with little filtering like the Baofeng, you may deafen it into hearing no wanted signals if operating it in an RF-hot environment.
For portable you could buy a Diamond antenna but beware of fakes (https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/how-to-spot-a-fake...) See that you buy one with the right connector (RP?, male/female). I have an srj77 from diamond on my anytone that fits and works fine.
For larger handheld or fixed you could build/buy a yagi antenna that has a higher directionality/gain.
That was one of my first computer programs: compute a 'perfect' Yagi for a given frequency. Of course it will never be perfect because you will use tubes with a non-zero diameter and there will be something to carry the reflectors on and so on but it's amazing how close you can get if you cut and space precisely.
I've used baofeng as a base for a while. I put a home-made yagi on the roof of a shed and I could communicate with probably a few dozen active repeaters, some hundreds of miles away. Had to rotate the yagi via a state of the art "nylon rope" system.
That's a small step on that particular challenge. The difficulty factor must be many orders of magnitude higher. I'd try optical before I'd go for radio waves, a nice laser might be easier to detect at those distances because the signal doesn't spread nearly as much. Of course your aim would have to be correspondingly better as well.
https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2024/uhf-signals-of-japanese-m...