FRENCHTOWN - Any avid fly fisherman will tell you that if you just want to eat fish, go to a grocery store.
But just as some folks would rather snag a trout by standing waist-deep in freezing water, Lance Collister prefers to talk with friends by bouncing the conversation off the surface of the moon.
After spending his days testing fire retardant materials for the U.S. Forest Service, the Frenchtown man devotes his spare time to some of the most difficult types of ham radio contact. His backyard, a former goat pen, now contains three bristling antennas that would look at home at the National Security Administration. Conduits thicker than a man's arm thread the wires to his basement, where a den full of knobs and dials and humming noises keeps him in touch with friends all over the planet.
Ham radio takes advantage of radio waves' capacity to bounce. If a cell phone's antenna doesn't have a line-of-sight connection to one of its network towers, it may lose your conversation. Ham radios can bounce connections off less solid things, like charged ions in the atmosphere. It's sort of like shooting a cue ball off the bumper of a pool table to get around the 8-ball.
Shortwave radios have used this principle for generations to send messages around the globe. Collister has pushed that method several steps harder. He bounces his signals off the ion trails of falling meteors, which may exist for 15 seconds or less.
But his specialty is moon-bounce contact. That's like making a bank shot to the corner pocket from half a million miles away.
Collister built his first major antenna while a physics major at Middlebury College. The technology at the time wasn't good enough to bounce messages off the moon, but he could pick up the noise from storms on the surface of Jupiter.
For all their size, ham radio antennas are relatively compact. The Mount Palomar observatory has one of the largest optical telescopes in the world, with a mirror 400 inches across. To collect as much visual information in a telescope as Collister can collect radio information with his antennas, he'd need a mirror 100 feet in diameter.
Instead, he has three towers, supporting sets of two, four and six antennas that look like sail-less masts of sailing ships. He makes them out of irrigation pipe, thin metal tubing and coaxial wire.
“You can't just order one of these from Sears and have them deliver,” Collister said of his antenna farm. “I'm mechanically interested. With this, you get a chance to build things and make them work. Plus you've got to know something about astronomy, space, weather and electronics.”
The latest array weighs just under 600 pounds. It's balanced so carefully, Collister can rotate it by hand. However, it packs so much inertia that he designed a very slow motor to move it without creating catastrophic swings.
The effort took six months of drilling and bolting and laying out pieces in the former goat pen.
Shortly after it was finished, Collister discovered he had cancer.
“I was taking Interferon shots, and I could barely walk up the stairs in the house,” he said. “At least this was all done, so I could just kind of enjoy it.”
His cancer is now in remission, but his radio passion continues to grow.
“I've never had as much fun with this as I have in the last year,” he said.
While some might expect the Internet to consign ham radio to the dust bins of history, it has actually magnified the pastime. Collister compared his ability to track ham activity by e-mail to a fly-fisherman's use of Web sites to check river flows and bug hatch activity. The World Wide Web gives him a global vantage point to see if radio conditions or activity are hot or cold.
For years, moon-bouncing wasn't practical for most ham radio operators. The signals were too weak to use reliably. Although Collister had been refining his technique since 1979, it wasn't until five years ago that a computer software breakthrough changed the game.
“It had been so frustrating to see those frequencies but not get them loud enough to use,” Collister said. Then in 2001, Princeton physics professor and Nobel Prize winner Joe Taylor focused some of his spare time on solving the problem.
“Taylor does in a couple of hours what other people take weeks to do,” Collister said. “I'm glad he decided to put some of his energy into moon bounce. He made it free for all of us.”
All that might seem like so much fish talk. Even though Taylor himself told the National Science Foundation that moon bounce contact “is the Mount Everest of ham radio,” the average cell phone user might be excused to wonder: “So what?”
Well, here's what. When a radio signal bounces off the moon, what comes back is so buried in meaningless noise and static, it's all but useless. Taylor figured out a way to strip away all that noise and static, so the message could be heard.
And the way he did it used a scientific discovery that has made every cell phone, CD music player and computer hard drive better. All those devices use digital signals to communicate. The signals are a series of ones and zeros - a seemingly foolproof and simple division of right and wrong, yes and no.
But digital noise is essentially random ones and zeros. And when those devices communicate, their messages get muddied by noise. Anything on the receiving end (a speaker, your ear, the computer's motherboard) must strip off that noise without losing the real message.
Taylor capitalized on a discovery by some other computer scientists that made it 1,000 times easier for digital machines to filter out noise from real signals. And he turned it loose in the obscure but fertile world of ham radio enthusiasts, who are further testing and refining its capabilities.
“This digital stuff is just coming around,” Collister said. “But we hams have always been pushing the envelope.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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