After nine months of effort, the incredible team of Curious Marc, Ken Shirriff and Mike Stewart have revived my 50+year-old Apollo S-Band communications system, using my ground support equipment and the vintage Apollo CSM transponder. In the most recent episode, they powered it up and got the Apollo transponder to lock bidirectionally, with the original NASA test transmitter and receiver, which we both restored to their original Apollo frequencies.
See additional images in comments below.
The original “USB” (Unified S-Band) was a common communication channel used during the Apollo missions. With just 20 Watts, they could communicate with Houston from the moon (across 239,000 miles). And a single antenna combined voice, television, command, tracking and ranging.
An artifact from the Future Ventures’ 🚀 Space Collection.
With transponder cover in pull-out tray; transponder innards on the right:
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