Hi --
I'm a professional author working on a contemporary SF novel with a heroine who is an electronics and engineering whiz, and she needs to build a radio transmitter capable of sending a signal some distance into space (say, 2 billion miles). She's limited by budget constraints, so she can't afford expensive pre-fab equipment, but she is capable of building just about anything she needs from scratch.
This is all being done in secret over the course of the book, and she's only going to need to transmit the signal for a few seconds, so I'm not worrying about the legality of it, the need for a radio license, etc. She just needs to send a command to another device in space to tell it to perform a simple command (i.e. turn itself off).
For the record, the book is set in the present day and on Earth, so ideally I want my heroine to use real, existing materials and equipment in order to build her radio transmitter. That being said, she is a genius so she could potentially come up with a Tesla-like stroke of genius to do something nobody has done before, but I'd like what she's building to be at least theoretically possible.
So what I need to know is, what equipment would my heroine need, or need to build, or possibly hijack temporarily (again, this is fictional!) in order to send a radio signal a fair distance into our solar system?
My heartfelt thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with this. If you are really helpful I will gladly mention your name in the acknowledgments when the book is published, later this year!
Gratefully yours,
--
RJA
I'm a professional author working on a contemporary SF novel with a heroine who is an electronics and engineering whiz, and she needs to build a radio transmitter capable of sending a signal some distance into space (say, 2 billion miles). She's limited by budget constraints, so she can't afford expensive pre-fab equipment, but she is capable of building just about anything she needs from scratch.
This is all being done in secret over the course of the book, and she's only going to need to transmit the signal for a few seconds, so I'm not worrying about the legality of it, the need for a radio license, etc. She just needs to send a command to another device in space to tell it to perform a simple command (i.e. turn itself off).
For the record, the book is set in the present day and on Earth, so ideally I want my heroine to use real, existing materials and equipment in order to build her radio transmitter. That being said, she is a genius so she could potentially come up with a Tesla-like stroke of genius to do something nobody has done before, but I'd like what she's building to be at least theoretically possible.
So what I need to know is, what equipment would my heroine need, or need to build, or possibly hijack temporarily (again, this is fictional!) in order to send a radio signal a fair distance into our solar system?
My heartfelt thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with this. If you are really helpful I will gladly mention your name in the acknowledgments when the book is published, later this year!
Gratefully yours,
--
RJA
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