(meteorobs) PER Radio Scatter over Oklahoma = disappointing so far

[James Beauchamp]

Doing a quick scan of the night's Spectrum captures, it appears the Persieds are pretty dismal so far.
All hits overall (under-dense head-tail only, over-dense without head tails, head-tail + large spectral trail scatters) seem to occur in short groups of one or two over two-minute frames, then nothing for 8 to 12 minutes.  Kind of erratic.  Overall I'm seeing an average of one hit every 5 or so minutes.  
Last year at the peak I was getting average two per minute. 
Breaking the hits out further, it looks like two to three over-dense events per night, with a trend of slow increase this past week.  These are usually short fireball events somewhere in the sky whose  ion trails are wide and dense enough to scatter the lower-intensity sub-lobe energy (not in the main beam).  If the thunderstorms aren't over us, I usually capture these on the Sentinel Camera with audio and post.  http://www.youtube.com/user/desertengineer1
The Persieds also tend to cross the fence laterally, I think, which results in unique hits without head-tails - short-lived "blobs" on the center radar frequency.  I'm seeing one of those about every 2-10 minutes from 2-7 AM.
Overall the scatter is disappointing.  Last year they were popping at least one to two per minute.  Maybe there will be better hits tonight.


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