Hi Fifty years ago, today, the greatest feat and adventure in human history took place on July 21st, 1969 at 256 and 15 seconds at UTC Neil Armstrong stepped down the ladder and set foot on the moon and in doing so, he uttered those immortal words: That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. And yes, the A was in there and around six hundred and fifty million people watched in amazement on their television sets in real time, a ten frames per second blurry black-and-white video of Neil taking those first steps. Everyone except Michael Collins who was 65 miles above the Lunar surface, couldn't see a thing. So 50 years ago, today that amazing adventure took place and no doubt there'll be endless coverage everywhere of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.

But I thought I'd show you something cool and come to the exact place where those moonwalk images where he took the video coming down the steps where that was actually received. Let's check it out and here it is. Isn't she a beauty? This is the 26 meter dish at Honeysuckle Creek just outside Cambre In Australia this is DSS 44 or Deep Space Station 44 dish that was designed and built specifically to support the Apollo missions and this is the actual antenna that actually received that video footage and all the other telemetry and everything else. As Neil Armstrong was coming down the ladder, this is where it all happened and right at that point, there and then a signal came down and it was transmitted live all around the world.

Awesome! There were actually three antennas are in position to receive the moon walking images at the time and this one. of course, there was a 64 meter dish in Goldstone California and also the famous 64 meter dish at Parkes which is about 350 kilometres that way. There was also a deep space network in Spain as well. They had the three locations around the globe, but that wasn't in position at the time to actually receive the actual moonwalk images.

And contrary to popular belief and what you might hear in the movie the Dish, the Parkes Radio Telescope did not actually receive the moon walking images. It was this one at Honeysuckle Creek they've actually got Neil coming down the ladder. Now, the dish at Parkes did actually receive moonwalk in footage, but it wasn't until eight minutes later that they actually switched to the Parkes radio telescope to actually receive those images because they were better quality images once it actually came off the horizon and a stop being buffeted by these massive hundred kilometer an hour winds at the time. But eventually they switched over to that for most of the other moonwalking video reception because it was just better image quality and than what they got.

A hunt at Honeysuckle Creek But this one did the business. Beauty. So why did they design and build this relatively small 26 meter dish? And when they had a 64 meters state-of-the-art dish at Parkes just 300 kilometres away? what's the point of that? Well, the first thing is is that the Parkes dish is only a radio telescope, which means it's basically only a receiver. it doesn't is not designed to transmit.

And the other thing just as importantly is that because of its large size, it can't actually slew and move across the sky fast enough to track the Apollo missions when they're in Earth orbit. And of course, they have to have the three locations all around the world. and they have to support all aspects of the mission when they're in Earth orbit as they go in towards to the moon and when they're at the moon. So the Parkes just just couldn't do that.

But the Parkes dish is much bigger so it's got greater sensitivity and they did eventually get better quality images from that than they got from Honeysuckle Creek. So large dishes like parks are pretty useless for tracking anything in orbit. They're just designed for deep space like Lunar distances and beyond. So in 1966 they built DSS 44 or it didn't actually have that designation at the time.

it was just hey, Chess Kay or Honeysuckle Creek and it was first used to support the earlier Polo launches and its first manned mission was Apollo 7. It supported all those missions, ride up, and involved the whole thing right into Skylab and beyond. So this 26 meter dish was designed to track objects fast in near Earth orbit and out at Lunar distances as well. and it could slow at 3 degrees per second.

To put that in perspective, the moon is about half a degree across in the sky, so it's basically six moons across per second that this thing could track. But it could do about five degrees per second. But as someone put a speed limit early in the thing bugger, so addition like this is a bit of a trade-off It's got to be small and fast enough to track in Earth orbit. But and low earth satellites and things like that.

But it's also got to be accurate and sensitive enough to transmit and receive at Lunar distances. So how accurate is this thing? Well, the surface of the dish is engineered to be within one point two millimeters accuracy, and it can aim better than 0.1 degrees. Now, this is a standard Cassegrain reflector design, and the twenty six metre parabolic dish is designed to focus the signals up to the secondary reflector, up the top and then down into the waveguide. But this one's actually changed over the years.

and here's a photo of what it used to originally look like it. It doesn't actually have that single protrusion coming out like it does Now, it actually had the weight of what is quite common, the full leg quadrupole designed to actually support the secondary reflector at the top. And here's some photos from the period and you can see that a quadrupole designed there, but in both cases it works exactly the same primary reflector, secondary reflector down the center, into the waveguide and down through the center of the dish, into the low-noise amplifiers and then into the receivers. and on top of the secondary reflector was a small acquisition antenna and that was used to help acquire signals from low Earth objects and just recently launched objects.

and then they'd know where it is and they can point the big dish. So the design has changed a little bit over the years, but you can still see an acquisition antenna up there. there's one on the opposite side of as well. I'll show some photos like from drone flying around this thing.

It's very cool, but we've got our main dishes are is still the original and it uses an XY mount. You can see the two huge axes wheels one in on this axis and one in the opposite axes there, and that enables it to track a fast-moving spacecraft directly overhead without any interruptions as I said, and a very fast three degrees per second slew rate as an up-close-and-personal one of the acquisition dishes and there's the other one directly opposite. but unfortunately the design isn't perfect. There's actually two dead spots in the east and the west where this thing just can't point to, so as you can see, it's still here.

but unfortunately it was actually decommissioned quite a long time ago. So, but it's just basically a monument now. I'm not sure if they can still slough it, they probably can, but it's not used as an active dish anymore. and of course it had to I Transmitted back as well and it had a 20 kilowatt.

The transmitter in it that combined with the beam width of this thing was I Good enough for Lunar distances. No worries at all. Ah, it's just a thing of beauty. It's joy forever.

Look at this and transmission was done on what was called the Unified S-band at 22 eighty Seven Point Five Meg's for the command Module in 22 Eighty-two Point Five Meg's for the Lunar Module. So they combined tracking, radar, command, voice, and television all in the one antenna. Voice and biomedical data was transmitted on a one point two Five megahertz FM subcarrier and telemetry was done on a 1.0 to 4 Meg's by phase modulated subcarrier. but back then they probably used megacycles.

Know this gigahertz rubbish. So they had a ton of telemetry, voice, biomedical data and didn't countless streams of information coming down. But the problem was the video. So to free up space for the television downlink, they had to actually remove the ranging code and change from phase to frequency modulation.

And doing this freed up 700 kilohertz of bandwidth on the Unified S band that they could use for the video downlink. although the problem was at the time and 700 kilohertz was not enough bandwidth for the standard 525 line thirty frames per second video format. So what were they going to do? So what they did is designed a slow Skiing camera with only lines at a frame rate of 10 frames per second. Black and white of course.

None of this color rubbish and that only used a 300 kilohertz bandwidth. Winner Winner chicken dinner. And the download speed for the telemetry was a whopping 2400 bits per second and that would go through the NASSCOM facility here. and that would be transmitted to the Goddard Space Flight Center and then on to Houston all in real-time And the uplink from Houston was a whopping 1200 bits per second.

Whoa! And a lot of people don't realize that the actual Apollo 11 camera on the lander was actually mounted upside down due to various technical reasons for fitting it to the lander. But it wasn't actually entirely upside down. it was actually at 15 degrees. So that's why if you look carefully at the Neil Armstrong's Lunar as he comes down the ladder, you'll notice that the horizon is not straight.

That's because the camera was not on the upside down, but slightly tilted 15 degrees. And in the control room, they actually had a scan converter switch that actually flipped a reversing switch that flipped the image up the other way. And they've still got the original board and switch from that in the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station museum here. So there it is.

the switch that made history and famously the Goldstone Our people. If you watch some of the images, they actually had the image upside down. They forgot to flip the switch and you can hear Houston actually tell them please FLIR Have you flipped? Just switch the other way. But but the people at Honeysuckle didn't make that mistake.

They got it right. But I'm afraid. I've got to admit something. Whilst this is the original Honeysuckle dish that received the Moon Landing video, this is not the exact spot where it happened.

Why? Because they moved it I'm actually at the Canberra Deep Space complex and that's the 70 meter dish at the deep Space Tracking complex here in Canberra They've got a whole bunch of dishes, but I've done a whole tour of this facility on my Eevee discovered channel so check that out. but we have to go in that direction to get to the original site where this dish was. Let's go. The worst thing about shooting in Australia is I'm standing in kangaroo.

This whole place is just filled with that. kangaroos infests this place. unbelievable and I'm freezing Canberra is freezing but I had to wear the Apollo t-shirt of course roads where we're going. we don't need roads.

hey hey, skip how you doing. come to check out the old Honeysuckle sight. Sorry guys, see you skip and here it is the original Honeysuckle Creek tracking site built specifically for the Apollo missions. Not only is where this spot here where the antenna stood, you can still see the original mounting posts.

they've got a big marker here to signify it, but also there was the Operations Center just down there and we'll go check out that in a minute. And of course this supported all of the Apollo missions right through from the early test flights, right through to all the Apollo missions Apollo Soyuz and also Skylab as well. and beyond that and after that it was dismantled and taken. I don't know how they moved it actually.

if I could find some photos, I'll include them. but they moved it over to the Canberra Deep Space Tracking Complex. the CD SCC and has stayed there for a while supported some more missions. It was upgraded in various art ways and this pit here actually contained a heat exchanger unit to extract heat from the transmitter.

because that the signals go in the other side. we'll show you that in a minute. Let's go check out some of the info signs, but I'll show you the original mounts. Let's check it out.

A huge disc shaped trekking antenna once towered over this circle about four and a half times higher than this pole. Yeah, the poles pretty tall. There you go. but this was the only spot in the world that was receiving this signal and all the Aussies here a few Yanks Here we're responsible for getting the signals and relay it, relaying them through a very complex procedure which I've got a video, various talks from the original people who were there at the time of how they actually transmitted this through the various telephone exchanges and everything else and distribute it to the rest of the world.

Highly recommend you watch that. So here's one of the original feet here. These steel supports would have actually like held a bigger pad right around here like this and there are four supports like that. So the honeysuckle Creek dish would have had the low-noise amplifiers in them.

and then you can see that all the signals would have run through this cable trunk here under the ground out here and this is where the original Command building actually stood. Now there's a bunch of Porter daddies down there and a guide, blow and some leaves and they're assembling a new display and things like that and it's yeah. I Don't know why they knocked the building down I'm not sure the reason for that I Guess you can't let leave abandoned buildings and stuff like that. So yeah, they went to the effort to actually demolish that, but this would have been in fact I'll put up a photo of how it originally looked and it was all nicely green grass, tanned and the roads were beautiful.

well at the top part of this anyway. I've heard stories are from the original trackers here that said yeah, it was a bit dodgy getting up here back in the day and there was surprise there weren't any accidents anyway. I've got some interesting stories about that over on my Evy Discovery Channel And on the day of the landing, they had a surprise visit from none other than the Australian prime minister at the time John Gordon and a lot of the trackers there and management weren't happy with that because they sprung it on them. And then they had the whole dog-and-pony show of the prime minister showing up as they're trying to get ready for the moon landing.

This is the only place in the world they can do it and they get in like in the prime Minister once his dog and pony show Oh Unbelievable. Anyway, he got his photo opportunity and the trackers here got the signal Beauty So whilst we've talked about the Apollo Ground tracking stations, it's a little known fact that there were other tracking stations as well. There are a whole bunch of ships so that they could have moveable tracking stations at sea and these mobile tracking ships were important because you only had a limited coverage area from the ground tracking stations, so there were enormous gaps in the coverage for Apollo when it was in or but so they had to do all those you know rendezvous tests in Earth orbit, the various Apollo missions, and well, you can't do that from just three ground tracking stations. It's not possible to get 100% coverage.

So they deemed that they needed more coverage. So they had a whole bunch of ships that they could move around, but ships are pretty slow. So they invented the Arias system airborne Tracking stations and Aria stands for Apollo Range instrumented aircraft and they had I believe about eight planes. They were Boeing 707s or the military versions of the 707 outfitted with this bold, worst-looking nose where they put a 7-foot unified S-band receiver dish in there and it could swivel around and make it.

Of course, they spread these planes all around the planet at various bases. They had some here either in Australia and various other locations where they deemed that they might need coverage and these planes were on standby or they're up in the air when the flights were happening so that they could actually get coverage. and they had a little seven foot diameter dish. And of course, they're 30,000 feet up in the air.

so the coverage available was much larger than what you could get with just a ground-based tracking station. So the Aria aircraft, they could receive the full voice and telemetry signals from the Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit. They couldn't get Lunar distant stuff, they just weren't sensitive enough. But when they're in Earth orbit, they could get these signals and relay them back in real time.

Very cool. But actually they had more than the three ground tracking stations. They had a total of 23 ground tracking locations in various spots around the world. but even that was enough.

so they had to have the ships and they had to have the Aria aircraft. Just the Aria project alone. I think costing the order of 60 million dollars and that was a lot of money back in the day. but you can see that the effort they went to to receive these Apollo's signals people think it just came in to one or two dishes like that.

Then I realize all the other very small tracking stations around the world, the ship based tracking stations and the airborne based tracking stations. It was a massive, complex project and really, they didn't cut any corners and they took no chances at all. So I hope you enjoyed that! look at the Honeysuckle. Creek Tracking station that played the pivotal role Neil Armstrong Coming down the steps was received here in Australia If it wasn't for all the team here, it just wouldn't have happened.

and well, the moon conspiracy theorist said have more to complain about. Yeah, lost the footage Shaw couldn't receive it? Yeah, sure, there's a whole bunch of things that could have gone wrong here, but it all went so right. So hats off to all the original trackers! I've been meeting them in the last couple of days and they've got fantastic stories to tell and the best place to find out all the info is at Honeysuckle Creek Dotnet and where they've archived all the if there's a ton of information on this stuff I Highly recommend it and if you want to see some extended coverage, go over to my Eevee Discover channel a link that at the end and down below where I've got longer videos with more information looking at the original hardware that actually recorded the moon walking images and also there's various talks and things from the original trackers and the original telecommunications people who were here at the time. some fantastic stories so head on over there to check it out.

So if you liked the video, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always you can comment down below or over on the Eevblog forum. Great read: Seriously, don't mind me catch you next time you.