Max Power wrote:

Has anyone attempted to 'moonbounce' or EME ATSC UHF band TV signals, in the UHF band allocation?
It might make a nice publicity stunt for the TV station involved.

What such a test could accomplish:
1. Find out if ASTC error correction can survive EME, enough that is to get a station ID.
2. Find out what 'emergency utility' such a communication system might possess.
3. As a propagation experiment.
4. As a test of a radio astronomy network.

A similar test of DVB-T would also be welcome.

From what I know about EME, amateurs use reasonably high powers, of the order of 100's of Watts, with many using several thousand (not officially so, but in practice they do).

Only morse is normally used, which can be read at very low S/N ratio (less than 1) in a narrow bandwidth. Single side band (SSB) is used too, but signal stenghts don't often allow its use.

To use TV signals you are going to need

1) Much wider bandwidths. At least 3-4 orders of magnitude higher. So that implies signal powers 3-4 orders of magnitude higher to maintain the same S/N.

2) Much higher S/N, to decode, so even higher powers would be needed. I don't know, but I doubt you could do it with a S/N or less than 30 dB.

This implies a power 6-7 orders of magnitude higher than what amateurs use, which puts it into the GW power levels. It is not obvious how those sorts of powers will be readily achieved.

Add into the equation the Faraday rotation too and I suspect it would be practically impossible.

Another issue is EME is normally done when the moon is well above the horizon so the antenna sees less of the warm earth. That will not likely to be very practical without a serious change in the mechanics of the antenna mounting.

An intereting question though. You might like to ask on the moon-net mailing list:

http://www.nlsa.com/nets/moon-net-help.html