Voyager 2 - Canberra Deep Space Tracking Network (PART 3)

More information on the NASA Canberra/Tidbinbilla deep space tracking network and the big 70m dish.
And the Honeysuckle Creek dish that received Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 first steps down the ladder.
NOTE: ITAR regulations prohibited what we could show inside the antenna base.

[@johnpickens448]

Mr. Stevenson is fascinating. You can tell he enjoyed being interviewed by someone who understands what the technical issues are. More please!

[@pcuser80]

Mr. Stephenson :)

[@johnpickens448]

Oops, thanks.

[@hlavaatch]

Excellent videos, you don't get such level of technical details on a general TV/cable show... love it

[@EEVdiscover]

They had the ABC/BBC shoot there the other month and were told to completely dumb it down.

[@mman454]

EEVdiscover *sigh* Glad that you got to go there to provide the information that the rest of us crave! Keep up the great work Dave, look forward to more videos like this! Also the Ness facility tour would be another good one to put on the new channel.

[@nicwilson89]

Yeaaaaa, I can only imagine they hate having to 'dumb' things down like that and appreciated being able to delve into the wonderful realms of technical details and science

[@ernstelderenbosch1715]

Excellent series of videos. Loved the Synchrotron vid and this one is again very interesting. I hope there will be many more. Thanks Dave!!

[@mumia76]

You get zero technical details on tv, all you get is manufactured fake dramatization. "Oh the dish is turning, but will it be fast enough to track the spacecraft? OH no it's so gripping (director to employees: Quick! Act dramatic, as if this is not business as usual, but everything can go wrong at any minute!!!!!)

[@thomasgaliana6288]

Not boring. Give me more. Much more.

[@17plus9]

Next week, Dave will visit Area51. Stay tuned!

[@macuser1232]

Did he ever visit Area 51? I don't see the video.

[@macuser1232]

Uh, I just wanted to know what was goin' on over there.

[@TimeWasted8675309]

Richard has an incredible width and depth of knowledge on the mechanical, maintenance, electrical, electronics, spacecraft, missions, budgets, politics, and on.. Great interview!

[@justjoe7313]

Oh god, "I can show you" is the best possible example of engineers love to gain knowledge and recognising this in other people. Looooooove this!!!

[@cybercat1531]

EEVDiscover - "The one man discovery channel"!

[@michaeltonge1971]

I'm an antenna engineer. You asked pretty much every question I would have asked. Two that you missed were: What are the focal lengths of the antennas? Why don't they use steam to cool the klystrons? Steam is more efficient at cooling than water, as long as the thing you're trying to cool is hotter than steam. It's used to cool klystrons in broadcast transmitters. I'm not complaining though. That was a great series of videos. More please!

[@sparkplug1018]

Interesting questions that would I'm sure have interesting answers. My guess on the cooling system would be, that while steam is very efficient in this task they either need to keep the temps below 100c, or that its simply the system that was installed in 1969 and they haven't upgraded it. As for the focal length, Google doesn't seem to return much, but the antenna is 70m diameter by 73m in height. Should be able to get a close answer from that.

[@feelx92ger]

My presumtion is that they wanted to avoid a 2-staged system where the first stage cools down to 100°C and a second water-cooled one to cool down below that. I'd think they did their calculations with high confidence and realized that they'd only need 1 stage overall. Simplicity is king. Having the necessity to call in people to work on pressurized steam systems can delay procedures, and I guess uptime is key here.

[@fohdeesha]

MORE! MORE! I could watch these 24 hours a day

[@yanovich3234]

When you first mentioned you'd be going to 'industrial' sites on this channel, I thought it would be a bit boring. Turns out it's fascinating. Questions you would want to ask to people you would want to hear. Excellent !

[@blenderbuch]

After watching all three NASA Canberra/Tidbinbilla I must say thats the most interesting thing I have seen a long time on youtube. Big cudos to Richard Stephenson he has the knowledge and the ability to explain something above most people/teacher I know of. Thanks Dave for the interesting Qs and making this video!

[@realbuckwell]

Thanks dave for not talking over the guy like your normally do

[@michaelsommers2356]

Regarding the sidelobes, in addition to those caused by diffraction, you also get reflections off the struts holding up the secondary.

[@nicolasduguay4]

-Are cockatoos a problem? *Cockatoos initiating war chants in the background

[@CatsMeowPaw]

This series of videos is fantastic. Top marks. Full of juicy technical details us geeks love. I would love to go to work and communicate with spacecraft billions of kilometres from earth.

[@skycarl]

Good to see this is back on. This channel should be another hit.

[@glenwoofit]

More of these radio based videos please. Anything space or high power RF or even Amateur Radio.

[@PapasDino]

Thanks Dave, probably one of the most interesting video series to date that I've seen!

[@ricoreyes6044]

I really like all these site tours and the depth of technical details. It's also really cool to have such knowledgable and enthusiastic hosts like Richard show us around.

[@JanKowalski-gq5fc]

Welcome again, greetings from Poland

[@alpcns]

Fantastic! Epic! Immediately subscribed, of course. Some REAL science, and a breath of fresh air from all the cr@p and nonsense on the internet. Wonderful work, Dave, from one the best content providers on KZbin. Bravo!

[@OtusAsio]

The channel is back... good!!! and those documents are very interesting... thank you!!!

[@dtiydr]

That is a pro standing there, very good and highly interesting information!

[@TheSkogemann]

This was absolutely brilliant! **Applause**

[@joepereira3421]

Part 3 is great, well done Dave very interesting.

[@materialsguy2002]

Dave I am really enjoying the new channel. Keep the technical level high please.

[@pcuser80]

Wow what a great video. Mr. Stephenson has a great job. Thanks Dave

[@craigs5212]

Glad you got the channel back, super interview. Some day do a Dave CAD explanation of what the front end of the receiver looks like and how that differs from one used on the Very Large Array antenna systems. Be interesting to see how the antennas are combined.

[@LtData2000]

Hi Dave. Many thanks to you and Richard for this very informative video. Make sure that Richard also gets some feedback.

[@SCAPE0GOAT]

Really interesting videos Dave, crammed with technical information. ....more please !

[@mikeissweet]

Love this dude. He really knows his stuff. Great questions, Dave!

[@daol03]

this is so awesome and technincal at the same time

[@Banadosmr]

Great new channel Dave. I love the format and content. hope you continue to get access to more great places.

[@AB1Vampire]

Awesome transmitter!

[@neaionqwe]

Thanks for the videos, and many thanks to Richard Stephenson, I hope you will be there tracking first spaceship with men to Mars

[@zaphodelektra960]

Brilliant Dave! More please!!!

[@RocknR00ster]

Yay, glad to see this channel back up! I really like all this super technical stuff.

[@dougsmith9679]

Thank you, Dave, for bringing me three of the most fascinating videos I think I have ever watched anywhere, never mind on KZbin! Richard is also to be commended on not only his extensive in-depth knowledge but also his superb style of sharing it. I can't say I grasped everything that was said but it was a fascinating insight into the complexity of the subject. Thanks again! :-)

[@patwalsh2138]

Good to see you back

[@timmgiles]

Really interesting Dave. You clearly have a knack for interviewing​ and asking the right questions. Can't wait for more.

[@boyinlove2k]

Absolutely fantastic Dave, some of the most interesting videos ever. More like this please.

[@Spookieham]

It's great to see the channel back. Yet another fascinating video. The trick is to let the specialists just chat about their subject which Dave does a great job off. I really need though to go back and brush up on my RF stuff!

[@LightSoySauce]

This is great Dave, the level of technical detail is good... don't whatever you do listen if people talk about it being too in depth and boring.... it's the opposite, stimulating! well done for getting access and dragging Chris along with you, hope he enjoyed it as much as you no doubt did.

[@bloodaid]

It's back? Nice!

[@antoineroquentin2297]

400kW at 63dB antenna gain equals roughly 800GW ERP (effective radiated power) I want one in my backyard. For reasons...

[@sparkplug1018]

I don't need reasons, I just want one!

[@EEVdiscover]

Build it and they will come.

[@antoineroquentin2297]

I would have, but my local electronics supplier ran out of 400kW klystrons.

[@AKATEATime]

Woohoo, the channel is back!

[@histopixelfilms6778]

There is a lot of conjecture still that Parkes was the dominant receiving station during the moon landing. Because the data streams were selected as per a diversity style system, its very hard to tell, but the consensus is that Parkes with its much larger 210 foot dish had the best signal at the time, so it was the primary receiver.

[@lanceripplinger8352]

Fantastic series, thanks Dave! One of the many reasons to subscribe to your channels! Here's hoping for more in the future!

[@jasonbrindamour903]

Aww geez Dave! The camera kept moving to keep the engineer in frame during the 14:00 and beyond period....I want to blow by the frames and see the antenna move over that amount of time....that recentering totally killed my idea...LOL, but as always...another great geek video! I wish I had seen how the cable lengths are held in place, those most be some damn good grommets!

[@jimsmindonline]

Very cool, enjoyed those. 👍

[@ntesla66]

Good Stuff!!! Glad to see KZbin plucked their head out.

[@eman59461]

Interesting video. Great work.

[@alexville3203]

love these space videos!!

[@MoTown44240]

This has been very interesting.

[@coherentmud]

I'm on days off, what am I watching this for. See you Saturday VGR2.

[@darryllawler2777]

phenomenal content. thank you so much, dave

[@bug1on1]

great interview, nerdy, epic, science... a real life episode of "Star Trek"... love it next up - LHC, please!... ;D

[@EdEditz]

Hey you got your channel back! Good show old boy! :)

[@verargertesspielen4629]

Wow the Channel ist back!!!

[@johnkrols7974]

This video beats Discovery Channel

[@you238]

Hah, the kylstron at 7:00 looks to be the one on the Wikipedia article for "Klystron". It doesn't seem like it's moved since then: 2004.

[@cybercat1531]

They must have their old stuff just standing there for tours. That one is obviously not operational.

[@VraccasVII]

I just love how inside of one the most sophisticated facilities humanity has ever created, such a vital component sits on four pieces of lose wood.

[@zqjzqjzqjzqj]

you238 Love the " open" transformer as well, just sitting there, great!

[@peebrain69]

Very cool! Thanks!

[@lennartgosman3640]

It's BACK!

[@stargazer7644]

Very cool. I like this.

[@k7iq]

he's back !

[@tomwiles]

Awesome content!!!!!

[@kolby4078]

good to be back, I guess youtube dont like being called on their BS

[@jhonsteenbergen7711]

welcome back.. ;-)

[@interestingspagetti]

Hey! Got your channel back then. Really interesting watch. I dont believe we been to the moon tho :P

[@eddiespencer1]

If you ever come to the US, try to visit Goldstone in the Mojave desert of southern California. It's near Ft. Irwin NTC, so access might be quite limited though.

[@pa3deeghztv302]

nice video dave

[@MrYamashici]

Great series! You'd use another microphone though, so that we could hear the questions properly :)

[@proudsnowtiger]

I could watch this all day. So many questions - why 100 Hz? How efficient is that klystron, and how do you keep it cool if it's up at the feedpoint? What does a Voyager/New Horizons data acquistion pass actually look like in the control room? Have they ever actually fried a cockatoo, and what did it taste like?

[@harbselectronicslab3551]

110 Hz is a tighter standard than 10 Mhz.......The feed point is down a the the centre of the dish.......like a data stream....... Yes they have.......Chicken

[@lmaoroflcopter]

proudsnowtiger The cones are already cryogenically cooled so they simply utilise what's already there, the shorter waveguides/plumbing due to the klystron being so close to the feed point brings efficiency wins too.

[@mduvigneaud]

So much awesome! :D

[@harbselectronicslab3551]

During the TX cycle and the dish is pointed straight up and at Maximum power, the scientists all sit outside and pray for a flock of birds to fly over.....this soon fills the dish like a big wok and keeps the whole Canberra scientific community fed for weeks

[@enricorov]

Thank you, Dave, for this video series. And congratulations on your freshly unbanned channel. I love what you do, keep it up!

[@aladaris]

Great video! Maybe you should subtitle the people off camera :)

[@brandonjamesadams]

Awesome.

[@timlipinski2571]

Had a chance to take a special tour of a dish at the VLA and climb into the dish ! The same dish that Carl Sagan was on ! ! ! They had rotating wind speed meters on the edge of the dish and at 25 MPH the dish would go to storage position (point straight up). Would they let you use a wired microphone ? (Guess they where afraid that a wireless microphone would knock them off the air...) In the future they will talk to the Colony Ships heading to another star system. Thank you for the video ! tjl

[@veganath]

My ideal job..... This stuff is the bee's knees

[@billyr9840]

Nice !

[@coolman1987us]

Dave maybe you can shed some light on this question for me. Obviously the voyagers dont have 400kw transmitters. Why do we need so much power to talk to voyager but the craft only needs a fraction of that to transmit back? Love the eevblog and the voyager channel by the way, thanks for all you do.

[@EEVdiscover]

The voyager only has a 3m antenna and ancient receiver technology, hence we need to pump 18kW to it to get a decent receive signal level. Earth has a 70m dish with modern receiver tech, hence Voyager only needs to pump 10's of watts to get a signal here.

[@ForViewingOnly]

Dave, good to see the channel back. Did you get a reason, excuse or apology from KZbin?

[@EEVblog]

Nope.

[@sighpocket5]

Nice!!

[@NeverTalkToCops1]

Daiyve, Daiyve - Seems like your warming up for your excursion to PINE GAP, where the boffins there will freely explain extraterrestial tech to you, Daiyve, IF you can keep up. The presentation will be 10x more dense than the excellent demonstrations of crude radio telescope here at Canberra by Mr. Stephens. Here's a juicy clue: At Canberra you see the 400KW Klystron. Now, buried deep at PINE GAP is a device of similar power, except it modulates space itself, not puny EM and laser beam pointers and such. PINE GAP Daiyve, load up the Toyota Land cruiser with your best ET stories and prepare to be astonished.

[@ronnewby3196]

Thumbs up

[@cozzm0AU]

18:36 - so the movie "The Dish" was wrong ?? It implied Parkes received the pictures for the landing. I feel ripped off.

[@EEVblog]

Welcome to hollywood.

[@KnaufL]

Are there more episodes of this to come,Dave?

[@HarmanRobotics]

Wouldn't the radiating power be distributed over the nearly 4,000 sq. m of dish area - and not present a danger to a bird passing overhead? Between the dish and sub reflector, that would surely be a hot zone but not above the dish.

[@ckbne]

Dave with that sort of xmit power do they need to track crossing aircraft or might i get a sterile dose of RF occasionally?

[@gregandruk9887]

Glad to see that whatever snafu snagged its teeth on your new channel let go!!

[@revealingfacts4all]

curious. I noticed florescent lamps in the room where the amplifier is. when I used to run cable for ethernet networks, the rule was to avoid running the cables next to florescent lamps due to potential noise. I wonder why this doesnt appear to be a conooncern here too with a higher sensitivity to noise?

[@Mythricia1988]

The amplifiers aren't there though, like he said - they're actually much further up in the dish. Down where they filmed it's just basically the large burly control stuff.

[@revealingfacts4all]

ah, ok, I guess I missed that detail. Thank you.

[@roytan7962]

I love Analog signal 👽👍I build transmitter

[@soothcoder]

This is really good stuff. Hey I wonder if cross-wind effects the squint?

[@MatthewSuffidy]

Maybe it is just me, but a lot of Dave's newer videos are like choppy for a while at the start and then go back to smooth movement. This happened at the maker place also. Maybe the cyclotron is needed to make an intense transmission so that for example voyager 2 could hear it. Also the other way around you'd need a good receiver...

[@CecilMerrell]

superglad the channel is alive again. what was the issue?

[@EEVdiscover]

No idea.

[@Petertronic]

Probably a dumb youtube algorithm. New channel + duplicate videos = takedown. And wait for the owner to complain before an actual human reviews the decision.

[@coolman1987us]

this comment actually shows how uneducated and ignorant you really are... just saying...

[@alpcns]

Another candidate for the Darwin Award.

[@alpcns]

That we can agree on! However, that doesn't mean they won nor will they win. But the times, they are a-changing...

[@tiltedstudio]

Dave, did you go to Honeysuckle Creek? Not much to look at these days, but the foundations are still there.

[@EEVdiscover]

I saw the dish, much more interesting than the foundations!

[@tiltedstudio]

Oh totally. The old site is mostly roos, camping and burnouts these days. You can sort of get a feel for how the site layout was, but it's very overgrown. Almost all of the classic electronics smell is gone.

[@roberteliassen5020]

15:38 Do you guys really say "one Hert, two Hertz"? Is it the same with Siemens (electrical conductance)? One Siemen, two Siemens? What about "one Celsiu, two Celsius"? ;-) I've heard others saying "one hert" like "Hertz" was plural. It's a surname, isn't it? Like Mr. Jones. If Dave came up with a unit, would it be "one Jone, two Jones"? :-D Just curious about the English language. I'm not a native English speaker.

[@cybercat1531]

It's a unit named after german physicist Gustav Ludwig Hertz who happened to have a name end on a z. Non german speakers tend to treat the z/s as a plural form, but in german that is not always the case. so 'Hert' is technically wrong. It is a combined plural and singular unit of measurement. Hertz is just Hertz. 0.2Hz, 1Hz, 1Ghz. It's not a unit like meter where you can have a singular and plural form depending the amount of units.

[@blenderbuch]

Ein halber Meter, ein Meter, zwei Meter, tausend Meter. No plural here also.

[@cybercat1531]

Yet in English: Half a meter, one meter, two meters, one thousand meters. There is a plural form. Natural languages don't always make sense.

[@roberteliassen5020]

I can understand why some people say "Hert" (when they don't know the origin). It's one volt, five volts (Alessandro Volta), one amp, two amps (André-Marie Ampère), one ohm, ten ohms (Georg Simon Ohm), one henry two henries (Joseph Henry), one farad, two farads (Michael Faraday). Hertz is the oddball. The correct plural hertz is hertz or hertzes accoring to wiktionary. I have never heard or read "hertzes". I thought Mr. Stephenson was one of the few that knew the origin of the SI-unit Hertz. :-)

[@asagk]

Why are antennas not built to be in space? They would be very much lighter outside of strong gravitational impact, had much less dampening without an athmosphere around, which would result is much lesser power requirement for operation. Just the price for it might not suit as well.

[@robwebster7406]

Back online :)

[@The.Chiefman]

These are great but Part 3 is not working ?