Apollo Comms Part 16: Stanford Dish’s Apollo Past

We are treated to a very special tour of the nearby Stanford dish, and find evidence of its participation to the Apollo program. Many thanks to viewer Steve Muther and SRI International.

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00:00 Apollo ground antennas and MSFN network
01:59 The giant Stanford dish
04:08 Antenna's engineer interview
05:25 Story of the 2018 Mars landing assist
07:33 A 1960's spy antenna
08:57 Antenna dance time lapse
09:44 Historical gear inside the building
13:53 Use in Apollo missions
16:24 Control room
19:07 Moon bounce demo with the giant antenna
20:26 Moving the antenna
22:01 Climbing the antenna

[steve_case]

Amazing. Big antenna, klystron tube, Apollo hardware and a PDP-8 all in the same video. Good work Marc.

[grebz]

Bouncing random morse off the moon with a big dish is the ultimate evolution of shouting into a cave to hear your echo. Amazing.

[engmcgill]

As a Stanford student in the 1980s, I attended a ceremony at the Dish where we officially retired the venerable PDP-8 and replaced it with a "modern" IBM PC. We respected the history of the PDP-8 but it was just getting too hard to maintain. I also remember finding that old rack-mount gear with the Apollo stickers on it and wondering how it had been used. Thanks for finally answering my question!

[idahoengineer]

I have been following this series as I watched everything Apollo as a kid. I designed the hardware and wrote the software for the propulsion system on the Marco cubesats. I was at JPL when the Insight lander was landing and both the Marco cubesats successfully completed their mission. I had no idea this dish was involved in the mission. I will pass this video along to the other team members on the propulsion system. It was a cold gas system with eight thrusters. Thank you.

[RonLaws]

My coffee went cold watching this! eyes glued to the screen the entire trip, great video and awesome to see! thanks to the guys for letting you have a little tour of the old and historic equipment. (the new stuff is boring anyway)

[nweston]

When I was coming to the end of highschool a friend of a friend gave me a tour behind the scenes at Jodrel Bank observatory. This was before the upgrades to the Lovell telescope (Mark 1A as it was then) in the 90s, so there was lots of 1950’s era kit still in use (including the control panel which I believe is still there and looks very James Bond). That also runs on bearings taken from old battleship gun mounts.
I went straight home and quizzed my maths and physics teachers about interferometry and Fourier transforms because there were not many other ways for a school boy to find out about these things in a small English town in the days before the internet. Still working in science and engineering today.

[StringerNews]

Outstanding! 1960 would be about the time when my mother was working on her doctorate at Stanford. I doubt she knew anything about the dish though. Mom never finished that degree because I was born shortly after that. 20 years ago we went back so I could learn a bit more about where I came from, and she showed me a lot of the Stanford campus. By the time we got to the tower, I was tired, and sent Mom up the tower alone. Had I known that I could have seen the antenna, I would have gone, but then I would have wanted to go see the antenna close up.

Once I got to come along on a private tour of Fermilab, and took note that the many power amplifiers used there were almost identical to those that we used in TV broadcasting. IIRC we used klystron tubes for UHF transmitters, studio to transmitter links and in ENG trucks back then.

[WilliamDye-willdye]

16:54 So the high-tech dish that supports Mars landings and micro-satellites is controlled by a Pentium II CPU running Windows 98 running a DOS program written in Fortran. This is why I still get calls from recruiters looking for COBOL programmers.

[bertholtappels]

I just can’t believe how you can keep on coming up with jaw dropping content. And this was a “viewer contribution”. You got the world’s crème de la crème of an audience. Thanks Steve for the initiative.

[freddieastaire]

The Sepia tone definitely gave it a very retro feel!!!
Great content as always! 😊👍

[MarcelHuguenin]

Excellent video, that was a great invite Marc. Thank you Steve for taking our intrepid Apollo gang for a tour around this rolling museum!

[pepesquat]

Being able to blast some morse at the moon and then hearing it back, delay and all, such a trivial yet entertaining idea!

[Herby-]

The "big dish" was used on Apollo 14, 15, and 16 for surface roughness studies. It received some frequencies around 400 MHz. It was used in conjunction with the Goldstone receiver on S-band (it used the video transmitter in the CSM). I was with the compute facility that processed the data. Lots of data! It may have been used for other Apollo tasks, I don't know. In addition, it was used at around 50MHz to contact the Voyager Satellites after they discovered a flaw in the receiver. They ended up not needing to use it for Voyager after they modified the earth transmitters.

[oilydigits]

This has got to be the best nerd channel on YouTube, bar none.
73 Steve M0KOV

[francoispf]

Magnifique 👍 j'aimerais tellement voir ça de près.
Et puis y'a le côté vielle électronique à lampes et c'est un autre charme.
Magnifique 👍👍👍👍

[ianmcnaney]

There's so much of this random old stuff in the bay area. It makes me sad that I never visited any of it when I lived there. That's how life goes I guess. "Sure, I can visit the Computer History Museum any time, it's like half a mile away." Years passed, I moved away, and I never did visit.

[RobSchofield]

... And a Grand Day Out was had by all - what a great adventure! Most enjoyable.

[randallhulette]

The brother to this dish is located at Millstone Hill Radar in Westford MA. I worked during the summers while in college on the antenna and site maintenance crew. I remember climbing up to the elevation bearings with a grease gun to pump 3 tubes worth of lube into each bearing. Best job I ever had - Phil Goode and Jimmy Hunt were in charge and it was a wonderful way to spend the summer.

[Bobbias]

This was absolutely incredible. Huge thanks to everyone at SRI for showing us around!

[fepatton]

I’ve been going past that antenna for decades, since I was a kid in the ‘70s. I had that Apollo 16 mission handbook, which my parents ordered for me from the Government Printing Office. I was (still am) a huge Apollo fan, and I loved that my local antenna was used for Apollo, putting a bit of the program in my backyard. Very interesting to hear about its other uses, and so cool that you got the opportunity to see it up close.

As I was watching, I was thinking how amazing it would be to hook a ham radio up to it. And there you did it!