(meteorobs) Possible alternative way to quantify radio meteors

[Jay Salsburg]

Hello Thomas

 

Over the past 35 years I have been experimenting with Microwave Motion
Detectors. I created Software that detects motion and records the velocity
data that can be subsequently analyzed and displayed in 3D in various Apps
like Excel, MatLAB, Statistica, etc. I spent years refining the tools in my
App allowing the user to adjust its granularity to home in on just the right
parameter of the velocity; like maximize the resolution, and disregard the
unneeded DATA. Most of what SpecLab records is useless spectrum or not high
enough in resolution for the events that really need better resolution. It
does have a great feature that my App does not, SpecLab is scriptable. 

 

Study on how to make SpecLab adapt to the velocity stream is worth
investigating.

 

The one thing that is not mentioned in all these reports is to record and
archive the velocity stream (audio) for later analysis, now that DATA
Storage is so cheap. This eliminates the loss of DATA by depending on
real-time DATA parsing Apps like SpecLab.

 

A single Bluray Disk can store weeks of lossless compressed Audio DATA. It
would be prudent to create an App that burns overlapping Audio files to a
DVD (cheaper), say overlap the beginning and ending of the files by 10
seconds and start a new file every hour. Then a scheme to use two DVD
writers to sequence the writing process alerting the user to place a fresh
DVD in the appropriate writer when the older DVD is approaching full. With
only a few dense events per year, this recording scheme would not be too
tedious.

 

MatLAB has very good tools for displaying Velocity charts from Audio files.

 

Jay Salsburg

 

From: meteorobs-bounces at meteorobs.org
[mailto:meteorobs-bounces at meteorobs.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ashcraft
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 10:20 AM
To: Meteor science and meteor observing
Subject: (meteorobs) Possible alternative way to quantify radio meteors

 

I proposed this idea some years ago here on the meteorobs list but didn't
get any response then. Here is the idea again.

So, along with the standard count and tally of individual radio meteors, I
think there would be scientific value in quantifying the mass of the
accumulated radio meteor reflections as received on radio meteor software
like SpectrumLab. Essentially this would be quantifying the meteor induced
ionization.

After sunrise on May 6th the over-dense radio reflections from the
eta-Aquariids started to run together which made counting individual meteors
futile. But the accumulation of radio reflections in intensity and duration
still shows the apparent passage of Earth through the ETA comet dust.

I posted a rough sketch time-lapse of my SpectrumLab charts for May 6, 2013.

http://www.heliotown.com/FB_eta_spec_May062013_0720_2004_Ashcraft.mp4

You can see individual sporadic background meteors as dots before the
radiant rises at my location and during a possible peak at the 1200 UT hour
the fireball trails of reflective ionization stream together. This
obliterates an accurate count but the meteor shower activity is obvious by
the density of ionization.

It would be a trivial matter to scan spectrograms and quantify meteor
reception as mass of ionization.

Thomas Ashcraft - Heliotown - New Mexico










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