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Old 30-10-2010, 11:56 AM
Karls48 (Karl)
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Karls48 is offline
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Sydney
Posts: 753
Radio Meteor Capture

This is going to be confusing rambling to those of you who are competent radio operators. Although I did electrical engineering in collage some forty yeas ago all my working life I worked with DC power supplies, audio and security type electronics. So my knowledge of RF is very limited.
With the weather being awful for imagining astronomy and me being interested in meteors I have go few times on radio meteor capture. It seems that main application other people using is SpectrumLab. As I understand it they tune to some TV channel video carrier frequency some 500km distant. They use SSB function of their receiver to display carrier and sidebands. Passing meteors ionised trail reflect and shifts carrier frequency and it is displayed as line above or below the fundamental frequency. Others use SW radio frequencies more or less in same way.
Now – my problem is that I cannot for whatever reason to get spectrum display that clearly shows that meteor has passed between my location and RF signal origin.I had visually seen meteor but I can to recognise it on spectrum display. What would be best frequency to monitor from Sydney? I'm limited to SW or broadcast FM
Equipment I’m using- Tecsum PL600 receiver, headphone output fed to SoundBlaster line in input fed to (software) SDRRadio by Alberto I2PHD. The output of SDR is fed to on motherboard sound chip and displayed in SpectrumLab. I’m using home made folded dipole antenna made from 300ohm ribbon for FM and long wire antenna about 7m long 4m above ground sloping to 2m.
I would appreciate input from anyone who do radio meteor capture or Radio Amateurs operators.
I do realise that receiver I’m using is not very good but until I have $700 to spare for Icom or WinRadio it have to do.
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