“…like Red Hare among horses, Young Miss, OVER.”
“Yes, just like the Sky Piercer halberd wielded by Red Hare!”
Ban Xia held the Yagi antenna high above her head. Made from a thin wooden strip and ten coat hangers, it wasn’t particularly heavy, but holding it up for long periods would inevitably cause back and waist pain. Director Wang said that to track satellites accurately and quickly over long periods, doing it by hand wasn’t practical—at minimum, they’d need an equatorial mount. Of course, having Ban Xia hand-craft an equatorial mount wasn’t practical either. The only reasonable solution was to hang the relay satellite 36,000 kilometers above Nanjing.
“How do I use this antenna?”
“Attach it to your handheld radio, Young Miss,” Bai Yang explained. “The satellite operates in the UV band, with a downlink frequency of 430MHz. The 725 can’t receive waves at this frequency, so you must use the handheld radio to receive, OVER.”
“Just this walkie-talkie?”
Ban Xia fiddled with the Baofeng UV9R handheld radio with surprise. Could such a tiny device connect with a satellite thousands of miles away?
“Don’t underestimate the radio in your hands, Young Miss,” Bai Yang said. “With the right methods and techniques, it works perfectly fine as a satellite phone, OVER.”
“That’s amazing.”
Ban Xia marveled.
“It’s just one link in the whole plan. It’s not amazing by itself—the entire plan is amazing, and we can’t do without any single part,” Bai Yang said. “Soon you’ll have two satellites overhead, one as eyes and one as ears. The reconnaissance satellite takes photos, orbiting Earth every hour, passing over your head once per hour. The relay satellite stays in geosynchronous orbit at 36,000 kilometers… Oh? What’s wrong, Uncle Zhao?”
“What happened?”
“Uncle Zhao just got back. He was in a provincial committee meeting this afternoon and asked me to help find him some slippers,” Bai Yang answered. “My mom found him a pair. Let’s continue—the relay satellite is in geosynchronous orbit, so its position relative to you is fixed, meaning it will always stay above your head. This is the satellite that will transmit data to you, OVER.”
According to the space team’s plan, the relay satellite’s structure was quite simple, with only two functions: storage and forwarding. It wasn’t large, 30 centimeters high and 20 centimeters in length and width—a CubeSat weighing about ten kilograms. The space team said it was temporarily requisitioned from a domestic commercial satellite project, with all functions ready-made. The requirements were given one day, and the next day they found it at their own Institute 518 of the Fifth Academy.
Of course, the CubeSat couldn’t be used straight out of the box. It needed to communicate with BG4MSR’s Yagi antenna from a geosynchronous orbit at 36,000 kilometers—an extremely challenging task because the orbit was so high.
36,000 kilometers—what did that distance mean?
Earth’s equatorial circumference is 40,000 kilometers. 36,000 kilometers was equivalent to 90% of the way around Earth’s equator, or the distance from the South Pole to the North Pole and back to the South Pole. Across this vast distance, at one end was a satellite weighing about ten kilograms, and at the other end was an antenna cobbled together from a wooden board and coat hangers.
And these two had to talk to each other.
Normally, a Yagi antenna’s small frame could barely handle low-orbit satellites. The Fifth Academy colleagues responsible for this project tossed and turned, racking their brains, finally deciding to add a Yagi antenna to the relay satellite as well—folded during launch, deployed in space. Only with two Yagi antennas fencing across 36,000 kilometers of void could they transmit the data down.
Institute 518 was one of the joint manufacturers of the reconnaissance satellite. With their experience in extraterrestrial probes, the project was jointly led by the Fifth Academy and the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics, each responsible for different modules. The satellite and radar were developed by the Changchun Institute, while propulsion and orbital design were handled by the Fifth Academy. One ensured the satellite could see the Big Eyes, the other ensured the satellite could return to proper orbit after twenty years away.
This satellite was dubbed the “Zheng Lun.”
The relay satellite launching with it was called the “Chen Qi.”
And the Soyuz rocket carrying them was named the “Heng-Ha Generals.”
This rocket launched on December 18, 2019.
On the same day, Ban Xia completed her PSK image data transmission system.
December 18, 2019, might have seemed unremarkable to most people in history. At the Guiana Space Center that day, a Russian Soyuz-STB carrier rocket launched carrying Italy’s CSG-1 Earth observation satellite and ESA’s CHEOPS space telescope—just another commercial launch, an unremarkable one among hundreds that year.
But in the history recorded by others, on December 18, 2019, a Soyuz-STB carrier rocket nicknamed the “Heng-Ha Generals” launched from the Guiana Space Center carrying two top-secret payloads on a classified critical mission, heading toward the distant future twenty years away.
Operation Dongfanghong was now fully deployed. If it was a military operation, none had been so complex since World War II. Seventy-five years earlier, on June 6, 1944, Operation Overlord began in the morning mist along Europe’s coast, with 170,000 Allied advance troops landing in Normandy, opening the campaign that would completely turn the tide on the Western Front. This was the largest landing operation in human history. Seventy-five years later, on December 18, 2019, Operation Dongfanghong officially launched on an unknown historical stage. A Soyuz-STB carrier rocket carrying two satellites would reach Earth orbit twenty years later to conduct a trans-temporal strategic reconnaissance. This was the most complex trans-temporal orbital landing campaign in human history.
It must be said that Zhao Bowen was farsighted—he had early on reminded Bai Yang to teach BG4MSR how to establish a data transmission system, as almost all subsequent work would build upon this foundation.
The image transmission system, centered on three main components—the Icom 725 amateur radio, Celeron 3150 industrial control board, and Philips CRT monitor—allowed Ban Xia to see the world from twenty years ago, and let Bai Yang see the girl from twenty years in the future. Meanwhile, the remote control system based on the GR3188 analog repeater was essential for satellite communication. The 725 shortwave radio couldn’t operate in the UV band; satellite communication could only rely on Ban Xia’s handheld radio.
Now everything was ready. Bai Yang, keeping his promise, would take photos for Ban Xia. He even skipped school that afternoon.
“Where should we go first?” Bai Yang said. “Xuanwu Lake? Purple Mountain? Or Xinjiekou?”
“Confucius Temple! Let’s go to the Confucius Temple first!” Lianqiao suggested. “And the Qinhuai River too. To be honest, I haven’t been to the Confucius Temple since coming to Nanjing.”
“That’s just a tourist trap,” Bai Yang said. “Just a shopping street, nothing worth seeing. Locals never go there. The Yangtze River Bridge would be better.”
“I’m not a local!”
“Then let’s flip a coin—heads we go to Confucius Temple first, tails we go to Purple Mountain.” Bai Yang pulled out his Morse code practice coin and flicked it up with his thumb. The coin spun upward, but before it could fall, Lianqiao quickly snatched it.
“What are you doing?”
“What’s this?” Lianqiao asked curiously, holding up the practice coin. “A game token?”
“It’s a Morse code practice coin. Look, it’s engraved with the Morse code expressions for all 26 English letters. If you want to memorize Morse code, you can buy one on Taobao for twenty yuan.” Bai Yang grabbed the coin back from her and tossed it toward the ceiling again—
The coin spun upward to its peak, kinetic energy converting to potential energy. At its highest point, it nearly stopped, but this state was immediately broken as the coin began spinning downward, falling faster and faster, until finally with a “pat!” it was caught by a pair of small hands.