Amateur Records the "Sound" of Mars Express

gyrogeerloose writes "A French amateur radio operator who built his own ground station using equipment from an abandoned telecom uplink site has listened in on the ESA's Mars Express space probe. While his antenna is too small to allow him to download actual data, he was able to record and convert the signal of the probe's X-Band transmitter into an audio file."

Hire him

[acid06]

If this guy has so much motivation trying to do this as a hobby, ESA should step forward and hire him straight away.
Imagine what he could do if he had access to proper equipment.

Re:Hire him

[arthurpaliden]

actually he will probably be charged with copyright infringment.

I can make that noise with my short wave radio!

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'sound' claim gets today's WTF Award for its massive HUH? factor. Seriously? This typical shortwave radio noise is worth publishing?

Ham radio types are a bit like audiophiles

[grimsnaggle]

They'll often spend enormous sums of money and huge amounts of time trying to do something. Many try to communicate around the world on five watts (DXers) or try to bounce their signal off the moon (EME).

The difference, however, is that usually the amateur radio types also happen to have instruments that can provide some measure of success. The also tend to do things that are far cooler than having a vacuum tube amplifier.

But maybe I'm biased... I'm an amateur radio operator, after all.

That said, I think hams usually try and decode the signal they receive. Just hearing it come in from the air is a little bit less exciting.

Re:Falling may not be a bad description

[sandertje]

It's probably just an effect of it's highly eccentric orbit around Mars. On one end (apoapsis) of the orbit, it's 10,000 km from the surface of Mars, on the other end (periapsis) it's just a mere 298 km from Mars. Moving from apoapsis to periapsis might appear like "falling" towards Mars, and since there's a difference in distance: doppler effect. No need to worry immediately ;-)