I know this isn't Part 15, but a lot of
people read this board.
So - - I'll just mention that there is
a meteor shower tonight I don't remember
what it's called, but in the early hours of
Dec.14, and 15, there might be visible
shooting stars.
I have heard meteor scatter on my Tecsun
PL-380 on the FM BCB. I have used 107.5 MHz
which is clear in this area. It's just a science
experiment, but if the Tecsun can get anything
at all, that's really great.
I put it outside under a bucket and rigged up
a solid state recorder and a wire antenna that
came out of the bucket.
You won't get much. Maybe every hour you will
get a couple of "pings." That's just a change in
noise, as if somebody turned a transmitter on and
off very fast. But sometimes you'll hear a word or
two, or a teeny bit of music from somewhere.
With a portable like the Tecsun, you have to be
outside. It won't work in the house.
People with really good FM DX set-ups can hear
quite a bit and can ID some of these stations with
the RDS display. Sometimes several stations will
reflect off a long meteor trail. You will hear them
one at a time if your set-up is good. I heard about
a guy who got 12 dfferent stations off of the same
trail. Did he ID any of them? Well, no, but it was
still really cool. I got a whole phone number once -
well - but there was no area code. So I guess it's
not a whole phone number.
Many years ago, I heard a guy say, "It's 20 degrees at
the LakeFront." I was in CT. Is the LakeFront part of
the Great Lakes? The signal was really ragged. It sounded
like "picket fencing" on the 440 ham band. The receiver
was an Eico FM tuner with a "magic eye tube" signal strength
meter. With that indicator, there was no doubt that it was
meteor scatter.
Well, I thnk it's a lot of fun anyway.
Best Wishes,
Bruce
Meteor Scatter describes the fact that FM radio signals bounce back from meteors way up there as the fly by. Trouble is they fly fast and that's what Bruce means when he describes how quickly it all happens.
Wouldn't it be lovely if slow meteors floated past giving lengthy signal reflections so we could enjoy the good music or talk from skippy places way around the geography?
We get very few breaks living here on earth, but we take what we can get.
After a while, if you DX FM enough,
you can figure a few things.
I've gotten aircraft bounce a few times.
Let me check something.
Bruce
Well, my records say I got an
FM station in Rochester, NY from
Hartford, CT a long time ago via
aircraft bounce. That's 270 miles
if I'm right. That's what my records
say.
Back when the FM band was "empty"
aircraft bounce was easier to identify.
My guess is that it wasn't just aircraft
bounce alone. I think it was getting
some help from another propagation mode.
Bruce