April 5, 2026
Moonbounce or bust
An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon
Nerds Aim Giant DIY “Laser Pointer” At The Moon And The Internet Loses It
TLDR: A new open-source kit promises a 240‑antenna, backyard-ready Moon-bounce setup for a few thousand dollars, making space-style communication feel shockingly accessible. The community is split between awe at the engineering, jokes about NASA-in-a-garage vibes, and debates over how this homemade array stacks up against Starlink-level tech.
The internet just discovered a garage project that basically lets regular people bounce radio signals off the Moon, and the comments immediately turned it into a mix of space race, hardware flex, and meme festival. One user summed it up as a “wild hardware flex for a garage project”, absolutely stunned that someone wired this together with a Raspberry Pi, custom chips, and a field-programmable brain, all to yell “hello” at the Moon and hear it echo back.
The big shocker? A 240‑antenna kit that blasts serious power at the sky for about $2,499. For hardware nerds, that’s Black Friday meets NASA. Commenters are half in awe, half in disbelief, trying to process that this is an open‑source kit and not some secret military thing. Others immediately sparked a comparison war: one person dryly asked how this homebrew Moon array stacks up against a single Starlink satellite antenna, basically starting a "my space dish vs your space dish" showdown.
There’s also meta-drama: people digging up the previous post like it’s season 2 of a TV show, flexing their “I was here before it was cool” credentials. Underneath the jokes, the mood is clear: this isn’t just a gadget, it’s the moment backyard tinkerers feel like they’ve been handed NASA’s keys—and they’re already arguing over what to point it at first.
Key Points
- •The project is an open-source hardware and software initiative to enable public access to Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication and advanced RF experiments using phased arrays.
- •Its core building block is a 4-antenna C-band SDR tile with 40 MHz bandwidth per antenna, 1 W transmit power, low noise figure, and a Lattice ECP5 FPGA for low-latency processing.
- •A 72-antenna array composed of 18 tiles offers about 34 dBi array gain, ~52.6 dBW EIRP, and 60° beam steering for applications like backhaul links, geolocation, drone links, and LEO satellite reception.
- •A larger 240-antenna array with 60 tiles is designed for EME communication, radio astronomy (e.g., Milky Way C-band imaging), RF sky surveys, and atmospheric/ionospheric sensing, providing about 39.3 dBi gain and ~63.1 dBW EIRP.
- •Operation of the larger phased arrays requires at least an Amateur Radio Technician-class license (subject to country restrictions), and the systems are explicitly not intended for radar due to export control limitations.