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General Weather/Earth Sciences Topics => Earth Sciences => Topic started by: xykotik on October 16, 2011, 11:53:44 PM

Title: Space dust used for communications
Post by: xykotik on October 16, 2011, 11:53:44 PM
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?
Title: Re: Space dust used for communications
Post by: SLOweather on October 17, 2011, 12:46:51 AM
It's called meteor scatter and radio amateurs do it all the time.
Title: Re: Space dust used for communications
Post by: DanS on October 17, 2011, 01:00:47 AM
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
Title: Re: Space dust used for communications
Post by: Scalphunter on October 17, 2011, 06:23:52 AM
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
Title: Re: Space dust used for communications
Post by: xykotik on October 17, 2011, 09:52:22 AM
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)
Title: Re: Space dust used for communications
Post by: corwyyn on October 17, 2011, 09:39:11 PM
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.