This might sound strange, but instead of radio broadcasts, what about the possibility of doing broadcasts with bursts of light utilising lasers?
I guess my thought is based off the old idea that you could intercept data off a modem by reading its LED at some considerable distance - and just upscaling it with more powerful tech.
I realise that it would be near impossible to have the Earth visually see the transmission on a consistent basis, so what about a satellite in earth's orbit that essentially matched the moon's orbit, creating some kind of relay station.
Or better yet, use a passive element on the moon side. There are optical reflectors up there from moon missions that people can bounce (large) earth based lasers off of. Imagine one of those with a single LCD film over it. You can then selectively polarize the reflected light at virtually zero power use. It won't be a fast bit rate, the LCD could to 100bps easily, but I wonder what the atmospheric scattering does to the wavefront.
> I realise that it would be near impossible to have the Earth visually see the transmission on a consistent basis, so what about a satellite in earth's orbit that essentially matched the moon's orbit, creating some kind of relay station.
I guess my thought is based off the old idea that you could intercept data off a modem by reading its LED at some considerable distance - and just upscaling it with more powerful tech.
http://applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf
I realise that it would be near impossible to have the Earth visually see the transmission on a consistent basis, so what about a satellite in earth's orbit that essentially matched the moon's orbit, creating some kind of relay station.