BiggarDigger

Good piece of work Ian! I'll need to make time to experiment with the new script. Richard

I think you've got several things in play here, most of which are good. There appears to be groundwave signals being received before and after the strike. There's a significant hook from the head reflection almost buried under the 16:29:35 time line (which is a good indication that it's a meteor rather than aircraft or some other object). There are horizontal spikes appearing above and below the centre frequency during the decay of the plasma tail. I believe these are caused by the FFT algorithm aliasing when the GRAVES radar switches antenna array causing a step change in the received signal strength. There is a "double trace" occurring during the decay of the tail. I see this a lot on my long burst detection, but I'm unsure of the mechanism. I've read that GRAVES is running a single carrier waver, and your groundwave detection appears to confirm this: so I don't know if the "double trace" is an FFT alias (unlikely I would have thought as it doesn't occur all the time on my detections) or if it's some other reflection mechanism. I typically see this "double trace" when the tail reflection is "noisy". I don't recognise it from my amateur radio meteor scatter operation in the past and I don't know what is represents. Overall, I've seen all the artefacts you have in this trace from here in Scotland with the exception of groundwave and agree with Neil. It looks a good solid detection. I've recorded a few bursts today and saw a lovely visual Draconid meteor last night while out with the scope, but didn't record this one at 16:29. However, my geometries will be very different to yours. Richard

At 50MHz, meteor reflections should be stronger, if all other parameters are the same, as you'll know about from amateur radio Mike. I think BRAMS is the go to source at that frequency. I assume it's operational, but have no aerial to cover that band to confirm. Even so, it may be too close to you to be useful. Perhaps a 6m beacon in Southern Europe may be a good source? Spectrum Lab is a bit obscure at first when trying to get to grips with it, but is very capable. Good hunting, Richard

Looks good wxsatuser. I used to run 144MHz MS and EME 20 or 30 years ago years ago, but family came along and I had other priorities. With an antenna that size and gain located in West Sussex, you'll likely hear the direct signal which will make the weaker meteoric reflections less easy to differentiate. If I interpret your traces correctly, they do indeed show the groundwave as well as some scatter signals. The beamwidth will be quite small as well, so the area of the sky that you're covering will be smaller than perhaps is ideal. I'm not familiar with the program you're using. Quite a few people here use Spectrum Lab fed from an audio source. Spectrum Lab has a scripting language available to it which allows the program to be automated, logging meteor detection and writing wav and jpg data to file. You're lucky to have the Icom 7100: that's a nice piece of kit. I use a simple Software Defined Radio running from a HB9CV mounted on the side of the house at about 3 to 4m. Far from ideal for weak signal work, but it's proving quite effective detecting meteor scatter from GRAVES. If you have the opportunity to use a lower gain antenna, you may be pleasantly surprised. Richard