As usual there's a lot of confusion, some of it Allen and Weaver's and most of it
@Vixen's.
TETR satellites could not relay television, full stop.
The 60+ meter dishes cannot track TETR satellites, full stop. They're ones that receive television signals.
The TETR satellites were never in anything but low Earth orbit, full stop. A 60-meter directional antenna pointed at the Moon would not receive any signals from them.
Any claim that the TETR satellites were used to relay television signals to make them appear to come from the Moon is simply ignorant of the pertinent facts. It's just plain wrong—it categorically
cannot have happened.
You don't need anything like that to fool the public. You can just broadcast whatever you want from whatever source and say it comes from the Moon. You would only need a space-based relay to fool the operators at the MSFN ground stations and whoever else (the Soviets, Jodrell Bank, etc.) was listening in with their own big dishes pointed at the Moon. The TETR satellites cannot be that relay no matter how wishful and handwavy Trevor Weaver gets.
What the TETR satellites
can relay is telemetry—or rather, simulated telemetry. Telemetry is not television. But using the 9-meter dishes and the 26-meter dish at Honeysuckle Creek, you can localize and lock onto the telemetry signal coming from the TETR satellite. The telemetry being relayed is being beamed up to the satellite
from the same ground station. For a TETR satellite in LEO, you still need line-of-sight to send up a signal. The satellite is not simultaneously visible to multiple ground stations, so the source signal has to come from the same general location. It was usually just canned telemetry from a tape. The Memorex telemetry tapes could only hold about 15 minutes' worth of data, so you can't simulate a whole mission. And you're still just
obviously talking to a satellite in LEO. No one is being fooled into thinking they're actually getting signals from the Moon.
Was this the same telemetry that Gene Krantz gushed about?
Not at all.
TETR satellites and their telemetry signals only trained the field operators: the people stationed at the dishes around the world. They practiced tracking the satellites and locking the receiver onto the signal. Because the Unified S-Band system used a phase-locked loop, the lock-on process was non-trivial.
The fake telemetry used to train the controllers at Mission Control in Houston came from an entirely different source, right next door to the MOCR separated by a glass window. The simulation supervisors ("simsups") sat in that room and could see the controllers react to them throwing scenarios at them. The simulations were computer-assisted but not prerecorded. Simulation operators were flipping switches etc. in real time to make things happen on the controllers' consoles. Most of the simulations were only 4 hours long or so. There were a few 30-hour simulations so that the controllers could practice handoffs.
As I said, the beauty of the system was that each of two identical MOCRs could be connected either to the simulation data bus or the MSFN data bus. The hoax claimants say this creates a perfect setup where unwitting controllers could be fed fake telemetry and would believe that they were controlling a real mission. The big problem with that is that the GC console that controls that switching is in the MOCR. Anyone in the room could see what the switches were set to.
Never underestimate the kinship an engineer has with the numbers on his screen. We have a number of putatively identical machines that we deal with, each of which displays its status as a wall of numbers. Each one has a "personality" expressed in particular fluctuations of numbers. Getting ready for flight test last week, we had an engineer sitting at the console who stopped the checklist because, "Something's not right." What wasn't right was a dropout on a data pin. The engineer knew this machine intimately and knew that a particular data channel should normally have some noise in it. It should normally fluctuate between 0.00 and 0.01 in a characteristic pattern in standby mode—a pattern he knew well from years of operating these machines. It wasn't fluctuating, so the engineer properly knew to interpret 0.00 as a failed sensor line rather than 0.00 as zero units of measure.
All the front- and back-room controllers that I've spoken to speak very clearly about each of the actual spacecraft having a personality like this. Keep in mind that the guys watching, say, the LM readings had been reading that individual spacecraft's readings for the many months of testing and checkout. The notion that it can be simulated by some guy in the next room flipping switches is pretty ludicrous.
