https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_Grammar_School
Space Research
EXCERPTS
In the 1960s, Geoffrey Perry, head of the school Physics department experimented with using satellite signals and the Doppler effect as an aid to teaching. The activity soon grew into regular monitoring of Soviet launched satellites and expanded into an international collaboration that became known as the Kettering Group.
In 1966 the project went international when Swedish student Sven Grahn contacted the group with a recording of the signals from Kosmos 104.
The same year it discovered Soviet launches from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, officially unacknowledged until 1983.
In 1969, a group used simple radio equipment to monitor the Apollo 11 mission and calculated its orbits.
According to the group, in December 1972 a member "pick[ed] up Apollo 17 on its way to the Moon".
Before Apollo 8 apparently they weren’t too sure how far VHF worked in space, they allocated a channel on the spacecraft and played music constantly, both for something to listen to if they wanted, and to see how far it was a usable signal. I can’t remember what the figures posted were though a lot farther out than the engineers thought. Maybe halfway or 3/4 of the way there.
They used S band communications, picked up by sensitive large radio telescopes in 3 locations around the world. One of them is in the Mojave at Camp Irwin. A lot of the communications gear was made in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at Collins Radio, I think Philco and RCA and all kinds of folks got involved. For an engineer or mechanic or welder or even bucking rivets it must have been extremely gratifying.
Moon Lasers Are Creating the Galaxy’s Fastest Internet
NASA and MIT are shooting "lasers full of Internet" to a ship named LADEE that's exploring the moon's atmosphere. According to NASA, speeds have reached 622 megabits per second (Hong Kong tops out at 63.6).
Right now, the agency is using a pulsed laser beam to transmit a pair of HD video signals to and from the moon. The 239,000 miles between the New Mexico ground station and the moon marks the "longest two-way laser communication ever demonstrated," according to NASA.
In one test, NASA sent an HD video of Bill Nye (the science guy) from a Massachusetts station to the New Mexico transmitters to the moon—and back through the same route—with just a seven-second delay. It takes 1.3 seconds for a signal to make the one-way trip to the moon.
NASA says the information it's receiving now is so precise it can determine LADEE's distance from Earth to within half an inch.