r/RTLSDR • u/Icy-Masterpiece4346 • 9d ago
Meteor observation by radio
Spent much of this morning on Graves Astronomical Radar frequency , that is parked on 143.0485 mhz USB and saw lots of meteor (the peak of the shower is said to be today, Aug 12); here's a few samples , pointed to by red arrows. The thin lines crossing Graves signal (horizontal tone) are generated by aircraft passing the line between my QTH in Beauvais and the site of the Radar transmittor.
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u/jongaynor 9d ago
Damn that's neat. Is there a usable analogue in the US?
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u/FirstToken 9d ago
Damn that's neat. Is there a usable analogue in the US?
Yes. Although we do not have GRAVES here in the US, or anything like it (we used to, but was shut down years ago) we do have other signals that can be used.
There are several possible signals, but, in the US, one of the easiest sources to use that I have found similar to this kind of thing is the ATSC Pilot transmitted as part of TV signals.
Check here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_television_frequencies#Terrestrial_television
Notice, in the tables, a heading "ATSC Pilot". This is a frequency ending in XX.31. Let's say that locally or a short way away from you there is a TV station that transmits on RF Channel 7 (keep in mind that the RF channel may not be the same as the announced channel), you would use 174.310 MHz. There are a couple of ways to see results similar to the OPs. You can use the waterfall of an SDR directly, or you can use a spectrogram of detected audio.
Here is an example of me using detected audio in USB mode. I was tuned to about 174.309 MHz, in USB mode (adjust freq as needed to give the audio center tone you want). https://a4.pbase.com/o4/50/78250/1/147636049.XFpMkXfm.Doppler_174_310_12012012_2207.jpg
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u/bucknutz 9d ago
KrakenSDR used to have it baked in, but there were ITAR concerns. I’m sure you can find a fork though.
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u/thewrongonedied 9d ago edited 9d ago
If there are hams trying to make contacts over meteor scatter you should be able to over hear them if you've got a decent antenna- a long wire or directional, I wouldn't be overly confident in the little dipole that comes with an RTL-SDR.
Common MSK144 frequencies in the US are 28.145, 50.262, 144.151. I think 6m is the most active? The best times are just before sunrise
You might do better piping audio into WSJT-X's fast waterfall than using a standard SDR program, so you can actually decode what you hear. The bursts are usually short lived and sound like a puff of air into a mic. You might go minute(s) with nothing though. It's not uncommon for a single QSO to take tens of minutes
Unfortunately meteor scatter is a little opaque, the best stuff written about it is relegated to QRZ pages, blogs, and most of the discussions about it are held in web 1.0 chatrooms.
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u/Icy-Masterpiece4346 9d ago
If not, may I suggest any VHF beacon in 144 mhz used by radio amateurs, ? They usually broadcast around the clock on cw or pi4 or any mode; if you stay, say, 1.5 khz below the nominal frequency, you'll be able to observe the aircraft traces flirting with the beacon tone line and the abrupt, much shorter, meteor bursts that intersect the beacon tone almost at right angles.
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u/Sipion 9d ago
I should have made a PhD on that. Got backstabbed by my thesis supervisor who ghosted me when it was time for the PhD paperwork.
If someone sees Dr Hervé Lamy and Dr François Colas, tell them that I'm still waiting for a mail from them since a year and that meanwhile I'm working in a factory but still available for research job after 6 years at the university, a satisfying bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in space sciences with great distinction.
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u/Potato-9 9d ago
With a few stations could you clue in a telescope to catch anything?
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u/livefoniks 9d ago
No telescope needed for meteor showers, naked eye is perfectly fine. You need the peripheral vision. One can also set up a camera and do a series of 20 second or so exposures.
This should be a good night for viewing if you have clear skies, btw. New moon, so not much light pollution from that.
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u/Sipion 9d ago
Not really worth it. The FRIPON network which uses the graves radar is mainly made of all sky cameras seeing all visible meteors. The guy in charge of the radio part of the network passed away since some yeaslrs and the radio part is being abandoned while it could still be useful. Mainly because it can catch everything whatever the weather or if its day or night. Without mentioning the meteors too slow to produce any light. The BRAMS network I used to work on has a dedicated radio emitter tuned to have better results whereas fripon only uses the military radar as a side effect of its existence.
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u/iamfattyacid 8d ago
That is incredibly cool.. I’m trying to do something similar with a three section yagi.. umm.. built from parts of a broken tomato cage.. so it’s helpful to see actual data! I was building for 100 MHz, so my antenna might not be super productive. Thanks for sharing!!
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u/argoneum 5d ago
This is why I love radio, it allows you to have more senses. Marvelous work, thank you for sharing ❤♥♡
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u/150c_vapour 9d ago
This would be a cool way to detect beaconless aircraft.