SDR to track meteors ?

[Mad Pierre]

Ok so in this month Sky @ night mag, It's going on about using radio to detect meteors. I.e picking up radio that beamed up to space, and using software to pick it up. I've posted it here because of the fequency used. 145.05 Mhz. This month It's all about building the aerial , next month the software. I've took photo out of the pages from the mag, If anyone is instrested.

http://www.peterturner.talktalk.net/files/SatN.zip

Found a little more here, i.e Link to software.

http://radio.meteor.free.fr/fr/en/logiciels.html

Edited May 23, 2014 by Mad Pierre

[james92]

You should check this out https://code.google.com/p/cdar/wiki/SimpleMeteorDetection

[Mad Pierre]

Yep I'll take a look. However, If a cheap SDR dongle, can be used. It just goes to show what a hack can do.

[seriewoordenaar]

You probably meant 143.050 MHz - the GRAVES radar in France?

Depending on where you are in the UK, you might try to pick up two radio beacons specifically dedicated to meteor scatter in Belgium :

1. The 150 Watt beacon at Dourbes (Centre de Physique du Globe, GPS coordinates 50° 5' 51.1" north, 4° 35' 18.5" east) transmitting on 49.97 MHz CW and RHCP.
2. The 50 Watt beacon OT1KZG at Zillebeke (Astrolab IRIS - Vereniging Voor Sterrenkunde, GPS coordinates 50° 49' 3" north, 2° 54' 45" east) on 49.99 MHz CW and LHCP.

There's a network of about two dozen stations - Belgian RAdio Meteor Stations - gathering meteor data from the Dourbes beacon. Each month they send this data for processing to the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy in Uccle.

I put a SHOUTcast DNAS on one of these BRAMS stations so people worldwide can listen in 24/24 :

http://81.82.192.207:8888/stream/1/

Paste the URL into a media player - NOT into your browser - VLC, Winamp, ... all work fine, to listen. You'll hear two channels : left the actual radio feed from Dourbes, right the Pulse Per Second NMEA data stream from an attached GPS used for precise signal timings.

The best way to enjoy it is to listen AND watch the spectrogram generated by the freeware Spectrum Laboratory software slide by.

Due to its poor dynamic range, I doubt that a cheap RTL-SDR dongle might pick up these signals, but I'm always curious if it actually works!

As a side project I'm using an RTL-SDR dongle to capture ADS-B data from aircraft passing near the Dourbes beacon to identify their Doppler signatures - and this works!

A sound file captured from the Dourbes beacon September 3, 2011 where you can hear two very clear overdense meteors in a row :

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52458256/2011-09-03.wav

With this you have an idea of what to expect!