New Meteor Detection station

[mallorcasaint]

I now have my meteor detection station up and running in Exeter. The setup is fairly simple and consists of a Funcube Pro + dongle with SDR # software feeding into Speclab. I am using a Moonraker HB9CV antenna. The dongle is tuned to 143.049 Hz and antenna is pointed towards the GRAVES radar in Dijon, France. I am getting lots of meteor hits and they are automatically uploaded to my website which refreshes every 30 secs. http://www.exeterobservatory.com/meteor-watch/

An example of a typical meteor strike:

[Tinker1947]

So you get a nudge even in the day time.....

[mallorcasaint]

Yes, 24/7. Meteors are entering the atmosphere all the time but obviously the recognised showers are more active.

[Gasman]

How does the detection work John?. I assume the dongle via the aerial picks up the reflected Graves radio waves from the meteor trail?. I also assume from this that you would only pick up the meteor trails that intercept the Graves beacon and so to detect others you would need the dongle retuning to another beam or am I way off?

cheers

Steve

[mallorcasaint]

Yes that's about it Steve. The meteors ionise the air as it passes through the atmosphere and burns up. We detect this in the beam of the GRAVES radar which has quite a large propogation pattern. I believe some other people use a 50hz signal form a station in Belgium.

[Scooot]

Hi John

What sort of area of sky does a station cover?

[mallorcasaint]

To be honest I'm not actually sure. It's something I will look into!

[Scooot]

Doesn't matter, I was just curious. Seeing as there seems to be a lot of hits, multiplying it up across the country would imply we're being bombarded, which most people, me included, are totally oblivious to.

[mallorcasaint]

Oh yes. There are many meteor detections but fortunately most burn up in the atmosphere. we have a network of detection stations: http://www.merriott-astro.co.uk/spam3D.htm

[Scooot]

Yes I saw all the stations, fascinating. The power of the people, everyone doing their little bit to provide the data for who knows what, something that to organise and pay for would cost a fortune. Its brilliant!

[mallorcasaint]

All the data is fed into the UKMON network. We also have meteor all sky cameras. http://ukmeteornetwork.co.uk/

[Scooot]

Is there a layman's guide anywhere explaining what kit you need and how it works to set up a radio station to detect them. Is it something you need to be trained in or is it something you can pick up with a bit of effort.

[mallorcasaint]

No, it's pretty easy and total cost about £200. All you need is a Funcube Pro Plus SDR dongle: http://www.funcubedongle.com/?page_id=1073 and a HB9CV antenna avilble from Moonraker.eu. You can then download free software, SDR sharp and Speclab. Set it all up away you go.

[wxsatuser]

It's a fascinating subject.

I used to do meteorscatter a few years a go, ran about 6KW ERP and could work out to about a maximum distance of 2000Km.

Used voice and highspeed CW on 144MHz, great fun but a lot of late nights.

[JamesF]

Another entry on the "possible future project" list

James

[davy999]

Detections are easy, as long as you know where to find them )

You can watch our radio detections as Mallorcasaint mentioned

http://www.merriott-astro.co.uk/spam3D.htm

All data from the network is held at each individual station and pulled together when something interesting happens at the Norman Lockyer Observatory.

You can also listen to the live audio from our system here

http://merriott-astro.no-ip.org:88/broadwave.m3u?src=1&rate=0

(So much better than the audio feed from space weather.com) and made here in good ole Blighty!

Our 2 camera optical system is located at the Observatory, our last 10 detections from each camera are shown here..

http://merriott-astro.co.uk/meteorcams.htm

If anyone wants to join the radio meteor detection network (SPAM) please PM me for details.

[mallorcasaint]

The guys at the Lockyer Technology Centre at the NLO are doing some brilliant stuff!