Communication to and from space .....
I am certainly no expert, but I don't think that they would have been able to communicate without better equipment.
shareShort wave radio travels pretty far and Farmer was in a low earth orbit, probably only a few hundred miles up. You can talk with folks in Europe with a good ham setup.
shareYeah but he still would have needed a satellite or some other type of relay to communicate with the craft when it was on the other side of the Earth, which he obviously didn't have.
Also, radio waves are reflected back down from the ionosphere, so the signal beyond it would be incredibly weak
You can buy bandwidth on COMSAT and other commercial communication satellite systems to relay signals from your groundstation to any part of the planet.
shareThe radio used on the first moon mission was a 1 Watt radio. The radios used by the Police are only 4 Watt. All you need is line of sight with nothing in the way.
"She glides around the office like a magnificent ship" Sterling
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