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Hi List, I have recently been playing around with ‘Listening to
meteors’ using a radio receiver and thought I would share my findings…. For those interested here is what you do : 1. Get a radio with ‘USB’ (upper Side band) a radio such as
a ‘Scanner’ or good shortwave receiver will do (with a reasonable
antenna) 2. Tune the radio to a station that just below your Horizon (i.e >60 miles away) and that is transmitting a ‘continuous
tone’ (such as a television ‘carrier’ signal which sounds
like a continuous tone), in the UK ~48.25 Mhz is good since this is east Europe’s television
frequency, (but you will probably
need to search on the net for a station that is just below your horizon) 3. Having Tuned the radio to a
continuous station, you Listen for changes in the tone, when a meteor arrives
it reflect some of the radio signal and causes you to hear a distinct ‘ You can expect to typically hear about 10 meteors per hour
on a typical day, but during a meteor shower even as many as 1 every several seconds!
But of course most of them simply burn up
well before reaching the ground. Now If only we had some way of logging time against particularly
loud pings over a large area then we might be able to prove a fall took place at
a certain time, if witnesses knew the time of a fall we could go back and
double check the records! Maybe even an automated email alert system telling us
of possible new falls! Hope this is of some interest to someone,
it really is fun to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon! Mark Ford |
