First ham radio station on the Moon

The first ham radio station on the Moon is JS1YMG, which was registered by the JAXA Ham Radio Club (Japan) on 2 February 2024. The transmitter for JS1YMG is fitted to the LEV-1 lander, which was released onto the Moon's surface by Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) on 19 January 2024.

LEV-1 is a tiny "hopper" rover that was designed to explore the Moon's surface in conjunction with another small rover called LEV-2. During development at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the decision was made that the rover's telemetry should be transmitted using an amateur radio band at a frequency of 437.41 MHz. The JAXA Ham Radio Club obtained an amateur radio license from the American Radio Relay League (ARRL).

Following the announcement of the station, Ham enthusiasts around the world scrambled to devise a means of picking up this signal, which given its distance and low power (one watt) was not going to be received with everyday equipment. Others chose to pick through the recording published by a few big-dish satellite communications stations, trying to figure out the complex data compression contained in the phase-modulated signal.