Interestingly, in a very pedantic sense, not only is the
Moon the Earth’s first satellite, it was also used in
the early 1950s by the US Navy as the first
communications satellite to transmit teletypewriter messages from Washington DC to
the west coast of the USA. The Communications Moon Relay
was then established between 1960 and 1962 to provide
reliable long-distance satellite communications between Washington DC and Hawaii. Although
limited by the availability of a line-of-sight path from the
two stations to the Moon, the Communications Moon Relay was
used operationally to provide multi-channel radio teletype, two-way voice and
facsimile circuits as an alternate route for HF circuits during
periods of heavy ionospheric disturbance. The Communications Moon Relay used
ultra-high frequencies (UHF) (435-445 MHz) and had a bandwidth of
16 kHz. Ground stations employed 100-kW transmitters and 25-m steerable
high-gain antennas.
Other topics in our resources on Satellite Communications related to CMR include: