/me just fell into the 6 characters edit restriction, when attempting to fix a URL :-(

Yes, it's annoying sometimes when there is a legitimate reason to make small edits. It'll come with rep. :)

@MichaelKjörling then you need to upvote me more! :-P Nah, just kidding. It'd suffice to review the edit queue, if not already happened (which it probably did).

That was interesting. I honestly thought ionospheric propagation on Mars would be a lot more limited than it apparently was. A maximum usable frequency of 15.5 MHz with a take-off angle of 75° for single-hop ionospheric propagation is almost Earth-like. ham.stackexchange.com/q/421/29

Of course, that's 75° to horizontal, not vertical. NVIS = 0°.

It really is an interesting question.

I even did a blog post on it once upon a time.

We don't know about night time propagation, yet, but we will soon.

At least for me, it shows up on google, depending on how you search for it...

I googled for "mars ionosphere" and that NASA report was one of the top hits. Makes me think Google knows more about me and my interests than I do :)

LOL. I know google likes to inflate the search links to my site...

At least, for what I see.

Even if night time propagation isn't particularly useful for heavier transmissions, even 500 kHz is high enough that a voice channel and some rudimentary telemetry should be doable if you can afford the size of the antenna. For anything much more than that, I'd imagine you can buffer and wait until ionospheric daybreak.

And of course, if you're stuck out working in the middle of the Martian night, maybe Stack Exchange chat works as well as a real-time voice channel. I doubt there would be much in terms of QRM, at least.

You could probably set up a navigation station of some sort, which would be the most useful thing. It wouldn't be hard to have one way communication with that kind of stuff.

Indeed. And by the time you need much more than that, wait a few hours and the problem solves itself (well, sort of). As long as you have a way to do some sort of distress communications with the base, I think that'd be about all that is really needed. Most everything else can wait.

@PearsonArtPhoto Are we seeing a pattern with your recent questions on Space.SE? :)

"Put on hold as Off Topic - this question belongs on Ham.SE" :P

Topic of the week on space, Colonization.

(j/k)

Besides, the space question is about ionizing radiation, which anyone outside of the radio world just calls radiation.

I was thinking more about all the questions relating to Mars. Do you have a hidden agenda? ;)

And, we just went public. Yeah!

\o/

:)

I would just like to note that I am amused by the symmetrically disagreeing answerers in ham.stackexchange.com/questions/337/… .

Glad I could help

We're obviously both correct, but I didn't want to ignore his comment

OK, and now I am briefly confused, rather than amused, by the fact that your name in chat is the same as the question poster's name.

Yeah that was confusing for a while

I added my call sign in my profile but I guess that doens't work here

/nick Dan KD2EE

nope

yeah, chat is site-agnostic

ahh

so it uses your global name, not your site-specific one

well at least we have the icons

quite true

No, actually, it uses your "parent user", which is any one of your site-specific profiles and you can change it at your chat user profile <http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/97091/dan>.

Furthermore, Stack Overflow is a special case which has its own dedicated chat site; everyone else gets chat.stackexchange and you have to pick one parent user for all chat in non-SO rooms. Re-confused yet?

Stack Overflow is weird. I always have issues staying logged into that site.

But not any of the others

@KevinReid - heh, even more fun

It's a pity you didn't leave it a single line of "Stack Overflow is Weird".

I would have stared that;-)

StackOverflow is weird.

<--- shameless

Not as shameless as I;-)