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General Weather/Earth Sciences Topics => Earth Sciences => Topic started by: xykotik on October 16, 2011, 11:53:44 PM
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I was reading a recent thread about "cloud computing" and someone joked that they thought it was about fluffy white clouds. That conjured images of an etherial abacus and dusted the cobwebs off a news story I remember from about ten+ years ago.
There was a company that was transmitting weather information from Snoqualmie Pass (Washington State) by bouncing it off of dust falling from space, like a freebie satellite system. That was the first time I gave any thought to how much dust falls from space to earth. Tons per day apparently.
I googled this a bunch of ways, but couldn't find anything except that the company was called "StarCom" and even that little blurb was from 2001. Does anyone else have knowledge of this tech?
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It's called meteor scatter and radio amateurs do it all the time.
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apparently since the 30's. Here's a brief piece about it with a part that tells how you may hear something with a FM radio. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/01/26/0015208/communicating-via-space-dust
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Work inWashington /Oregon all the time using CW on 6 and 2 meter bouncing off the ionize dust trail and gases from meteors. It works well enough thru showers to sometime carry on voice comms.
John
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Thanks for the additional info. Someone sniped the starcom.com domain (for sale) and that new article is also from 2001. I wonder if there are any other commercial entities actively using this method.
In that article, a couple of clicks took me to an article about NASA's meteor detection system using "meteor echo."
http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatter.html (http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatter.html)
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Here's some more information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Space_Surveillance_System) on the radar system that generates the signals they are using to detect the meteors. I happen to live about 4 1/2 miles SSW of the Gila River transmitter site and pass it every time I travel up to the Phoenix metro area.