Open-source 240-antenna array aims to bounce signals off the Moon

What’s being built

It has been reported that a community-driven project is cobbling together a 240-antenna, software-defined phased array to perform Earth–Moon–Earth (EME) “moonbounce” communications — and the building block is a $49–99 QuadRF tile. The QuadRF is a 4-antenna SDR tile designed to be arrayed: 13 cm across, full duplex in the 4.9–6.0 GHz C‑band, 40 MHz per-antenna bandwidth, 8+8‑bit I/Q, and about 1 W transmit per element with an Rx noise figure near 1.2 dB. It’s small, cheap-ish, and open-source by design — the kind of kit that invites experimentation.

The hardware, in plain English

Each tile packs an FPGA (Lattice ECP5), MEMS TCXO with ~1.4 ps jitter, and promises sub‑millisecond latency. Polarization is RHCP for transmit and LHCP for receive, and peak power draw is roughly 25 W at 12 V for the tile. Use cases listed on the project page range from 4×4 MIMO SDR and fox‑hunting to open Wi‑Fi, 4G/5G base stations, drone HD links, and robotics comms. Stack a bunch of these tiles — 60 tiles would make 240 antennas — and you suddenly have the aperture and coherent gain that could turn the Moon into a passive reflector.

Why anyone should care

Moonbounce is flashy, sure, but the emotional hook here is access. Amateur radio and academic groups have historically needed big budgets and bespoke hardware to try EME. A modular, open SDR tile that scales to hundreds of elements lowers that bar. Imagine student labs, grassroots networks, or makers trying phased‑array beamforming on a shoestring. The technical challenges remain real — path loss to the Moon is brutal — but combining many 1 W radiators with coherent phasing can materially boost effective radiated power. Sound ambitious? It is. Exciting? Absolutely.

The caveats

It has been reported that the QuadRF will be available soon, but final pricing and delivery timelines are still TBD. As for the moonbounce goal, that too is early-stage: community projects like this often run into regulatory, synchronization, and RF interference hurdles. Still, for anyone who’s ever wanted to point a DIY array at the Moon and see what happens — well, when was the last time a hobby could look this much like frontier science?

Sources: moonrf.com, Hacker News