Meteor echoes from DTV signals
Taken by Jim Hale on August 13, 2019 @
Central Virginia
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Details:
Spaceweather.com used to feature a live feed of meteor 'pings'- audible radio wave echoes from ionized meteor trails - and I was intrigued enough to learn to listen to these pings using my own antenna and receiving equipment. With the shut down of the Space Surveillance Radar, and the loss of analog TV signals in the US, the hobby has become more challenging, and somewhere along the line the feeds from spaceweatherradio.com seem to have been discontinued. Now however, with the availability of inexpensive computerized receivers called SDR's, and the fact that there are still a few high powered Canadian analog TV stations operating in the low VHF band, it's possible for many of us in the US to continue listening to meteor pings. Until yesterday though, I had been completely unsuccessful in using digital television signals for meteor monitoring purposes, but the onset of the Perseid shower gave me more to experiment with and I found that a few adjustments to my usual settings yielded a wealth of meteor echoes coming from some distant channel 4 DTV stations. The attached png images show some examples of the "meteor art" I collected today when activity was at its peak. These are spectrum graph representations of the audio effects observed when a television transmission, normally too distant to receive, has been refracted down towards the receiving station thanks to an ionized meteor trail.
Photographer's website:
https://not yet
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