Tonights grab!

[Gasman]

Hi folks

I`m trying to catch an Orionid or two before the maximum comes around. The description of the Orionids is "fast meteors with persistent trains" now this shot shows an object with a rising and falling intensity profile (and audio too!) but as its over a minute in length I`m not sure it comes under the category of "fast" ??. The radiant is probably below the horizon at the moment and I`m not quite sure how the shower will show itself to a fixed antenna pointing at 148degs but its looking promising!. I`d like to be able to setup to save shots automatically and also the audio but haven`t sussed it yet in Speclab.

cheers

Steve

[SteveNickolls]

Hi Steve,

Yes it will be interesting if we get to detect any meteors in this shower. Whenever I've had a curving return I have checked where the ISS is and sometimes its been a reasonable guess the ISS was the reason. I'm surprised that SL isn't saving screenshots for you, when I was using the starter usr file with the short 12 line conditional action script screen shots were saved automatically 'out of the tin' so to speak. I'm still using the starter .usr but with a larger conditional action script and screenshots (at least of trails larger than 19 duration) are saved automatically in a meteorlog file I had to create in SL. Can't help with regard to audio files but I know Al has done a lot of work on this.

Good luck with the Orionids.

Cheers,

Steve

[Gasman]

Cheers Steve

I think there lieth the problem I haven't created a meteorlog file doh! What format would that take please?

Best

Steve

[Gasman]

Sorted I think! Had to create a sub directory called `meterlog` and change the path name in Phil`s actions!

See if something saves now!

Steve

[Ruud]

This is very interesting and very new to me. I think I see a change of frequency over time. 

How should I interpret this?

[Gasman]

Hi Ruud

I`m still learning at this ;-). I have a 2mtr antenna pointing towards the Graves beacon in Dijon, France which is transmitting a signal at 143.050 MHz and my receiver (Funcube Dongle pro+) is set for 143.048 MHz which can receive the signal bounced from the ionised air created by a meteor entering the atmosphere. The software is called Speclab and shows the signature of the received signal on a rolling screen in real time but I`m still trying to interpret what I see, hopefully others more up to speed on the forum can explain better than I!

HTH (a little)

Steve

[SteveNickolls]

Sorted I think! Had to create a sub directory called `meterlog` and change the path name in Phil`s actions!

See if something saves now!

Steve

Hi Steve,

That should do it.

Cheers,

Steve

[Al.Grant]

Sorted I think! Had to create a sub directory called `meterlog` and change the path name in Phil`s actions!

See if something saves now!

Steve

Hi,

Yeah you definitely need that meteorlog directory for the script to save the screenshots.  I made the same mistake when I first started using that script, I only realised when I looked at the script and saw the path!

The original S@N script saved image to 'screenshots' directory and if you click the 'Capture Now' button it saves the image to SL's installation directory 'Spectrum' 

Hopefully now you'll be getting those captures.

Not sure what version (date) script you are currently running, but in some of the later ones you can make adjustments so it only captures images/audio from detections above a certain size (duration).

The current script I'm using  also needs a '/meteorlog/upload' directory for the images to be uploaded to my website.  This version will take a screenshot every 60 secs (using SL's Periodic Actions) and also capture

the brightest (s/n ratio) and the longest (duration) meteors of the current 24hr period.  It will also keep the longest (dur) for the current month ..... however I've found that this actually resets if you restart SL.

I like to restart my PC at least once per week so it tends to get overwritten .... still useful though.

I keep the 'longest' and 'brightest' updating all the time, but only having the 60sec waterfall screen updates running during heavier meteor activity.  Having my PC trying to upload a new image every second is OK most of the time, 

but if there is a delay connecting to the server and it overlaps with the next image then it caused a few problems ......  plus it's usually the case that there isn't too much to look at during the quieter periods!

Currently the 60 waterfall is active - this image should update with the latest screengrab when this page is refreshed!

You can see that my filter is set quite narrow at the moment - about 2k - 2.3k - this is because I keep getting some interference that sometimes gets counted as meteors (lots of them!) so I wanted to limit the 

freq range where detections get counted ....... I'm planning a bit of time hunting for sources of local interference and then try to filter some of it out.  Not the easiest thing to do when it's mostly intermittent and seems to know

when I'm not home   

I've has some issues with my meteor detector over the past 2 days ....  for some reason it was only detecting a handful of meteors per day.   I rebooted and reapplied the freq but no good.  

Only seemed to start working again when I unplugged my dongle and then rebooted ... when I plugged in again it all looks to be back to normal.

Al

[Gasman]

Cheers Al. I`m using those latest actions off the Crayford Manor web site (Phil`s I think!) with Threshold set for 17 and Low 1500, High 2500. I think I need to tweak the Threshold a bit as its saving a lot of short duration shots. I also tried saving some audio by choosing the use `Universal trigger` box but it seemed to generate some biggish files so I think that needs a tweak too!. Managed to get the funcube  working with that Linux controller (Qthid 4.1) but Spectrum lab refuses to see the dongle at the moment so I`m close to getting it all to work under Linux and thus use an old desktop I have instead of the Windows 7 laptop which runs a bit hot after a while.

All interesting stuff!

Steve