An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon

https://moonrf.com/

Open Source meets Outer Space

Wild hardware flex for a garage project. Reverse-engineering the Pi 5's MIPI to push 5.6 Gbps from custom MASH sigma-delta ADCs to a Lattice ECP5 FPGA to the Raspberry Pi is serious engineering. The idea that the RF receiver looks like a "camera" to the Pi while the transmitter is a "display" is super creative. Getting a 1.5 kW, 240-antenna EME array for $2,499 is actually cheap for something like this.

Their standalone 4-antenna tiles (https://moonrf.com/updates/) show off some killer apps, like 30 fps spatial RF visualization and NEON-optimized drone video interception.

I'm rolling my eyes at the "Agentic Transceiver" part, though. It is highly doubtful that an onboard AI casually writes, debugs, and compiles a real-time C app with analog video color sync recovery and decode in ten minutes.

Updates - MoonRF

> Getting a 1.5 kW, 240-antenna EME array

It says 1W TX power per antenna. So the 240 antenna array which draws 1500W has a transmit power of 240W.

EIRP. There's some gain involved.

I think they're claiming the actual transmit power is 240W (23.8 dBW), and the EIRP is 63.1 dBW.

I am sort of skeptical of the claimed gain... even at 6GHz, you need a 2-meter parabolic reflector to get 40dB, the array is 1/10th that diameter. EDIT: Ignore this second paragraph I misread the spec page.

The MoonRF array is a full 1 meter diameter as shown on the page
I'm asleep and I misread that as 10cm. Thanks.