Detecting meteor scatter

>>1107929
Amateur radio operator here, albeit only a foundation license and new to the hobby.

People into meteor scatter and VHF/UHF in general use yagis, I would honestly get one or make one.

Why 143mhz? What signal do you expect to hear? Go up to 144mhz and you're into the amateur 2 metre band you might be able to hear the occasional signal from MS, tropospheric ducting and maybe even auroral.

What do you want to do and listen to exactly m8.

>>1107954
GRAVES system in France (military radar or smth) is at 143MHz, I'm not looking for anything interesting just something far away powerful enough to bounce off meteors. I intend to measure ZHR (rate of meteors per hour) with such a system, i'm not into establishing a radio connection with someone. I could try 144Mhz or 50Mhz if this fails, but GRAVES is pretty powerful (750kW !) it should work fine

>>1107954
I'm wondering is dipole(an antenna with no amplification) enough to pick up such a signal, or I need to ramp up my gear and construct a Yagi antenna (I will definetly do this in the future but the Perseids shower is tomorrow and I already prepared all the gear )

>>1108006
That's interesting and a good idea.

http://www.itr-datanet.com/~pe1itr/graves/
http://www.britastro.org/radio/projects/Antennas_for_meteor_radar.pdf

There's actually quite a few people doing a similar thing, here's a video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_TEt-DoJHg

As it's so close to the 2 metre amateur radio band you could just google 2 metre meteor scatter, loads of information on it.


What radio are you using for this? Or do you have an SDR?
>>1108007
A dipole is just a type of aerial mate, two bits of wire or metal with the feeder in the middle.

I'm not sure how successful it will but if the person in that video can pick it up on a small aerial inside then a dipole will be fine outside for it.

Make sure you make it the right length though, to be honest for near 2 metres you could just make a full wavelength dipole.

Sorry I couldn't be any more help, I honestly don't know anything about MS, just that people who do it use yagis, but they transmit as well as receive so the gain matters more.

>>1108028
Thanks anyway, the .pdf about antennas is very useful. I am using a simple SDR for now, but i think that it will be more than enough for what I am doing. If I manage to detect something tomorrow I'll definitely invest in good amps an filters

>>1108047
>amps
You don't need amps for receiivng mate, pre-amps are good though.

Can you post if you get something tomorrow? I'm interested to hear how it works.

File: the_dish.jpg (221KB, 800x468px) Image search: [Google]

221KB, 800x468px

>>1108053
That's what I meant, in my language it's all the same, something to amplify the signal coming to the SDR but also filter the crap I don't need. I could use the linear amp (pre-amp ?) and get as far from the city as I can

Sure, if i get mobile signal I'll post an update as soon as I set the whole thing up :)

I seem to remember some article about this being done on the FM broadcast band. Perhaps it was when it wasn't so crowded.

>>1108098
>pic
Have been there and seen that in person.

>>1107929
Radio-fag from VE7-land here with experience with non ham MS rx. It is possible to detect MS with a simple dipole if several condx are met. Try to orient the dipole so maximum reception is towards the transmitter. Best potential results will be during one of the annual meteor showers although meteors can and do occur at anytime. The transmitters I was hearing were from 50 kW -> 100 kW commercial FM and TV broadcasters.

Years I used to do long term monitoring meteor counts with a TV yagi and a loaner Icom R7000 connected to a computer via the soundcard and running Spectran. It had an auto-screencap logging function so I could flip thru them later and count the number of pings, intensity, and duration.

I have detected pings on the FM band (88 - 108 MHz) with the stereo in my car many times, and have also detected TV MS twice, one of them brought in a full quieting colour picture for several seconds with just the "rabbit ear" antenna! That one blew me away and I wished I had a VCR recording at the time. I had a 2m SSB into a 3-ele quad on the side so I could confirm there wasn't any tropo or ducting going on.

I have also dabbled in RA around 17 metres and 3 cm and 1 cm wavelengths, but nothing too serious. Mostly proof-of-concept stuff.

>>1108202
You can do it with FM broadcasts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQq1f4E09dY