Space dust used for communications

[xykotik]

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?

[SLOweather]

It's called meteor scatter and radio amateurs do it all the time.

[DanS]

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

[Scalphunter]

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

[xykotik]

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

[corwyyn]

Here's some more information 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.