http://www.amsmeteors.org/radmet.html
The AMS Radiometeor Project For nearly forty years the American Meteor Society (AMS) has encouraged its amateur members to experiment with the establishment of forward scatter receiver systems. First successes in this area were had by the Kansas Meteor Group, an AMS affiliate, in 1958. This group, led by Walter Scott Houston, established an automatic electronic system for counting meteor echoes from a professionally operated transmitter located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Featured in the July, 1958, Scientific American, this system remained in operation until the early 1960's. During the mid-1970's, the advent of the personal computer made it possible for amateurs to establish forward-scatter data collection systems of an even higher level of sophistication. In order to germinate this potential within the amateur community, the AMS Radio Scatter Program was created by Dr. David Meisel in 1977. The purpose of this program was to establish a network of amateur operated forward-scatter receiving stations across a wide geographic area, each station automatically collecting data on the incoming meteor flux on a continuous 24-hr day basis. The data collected from these stations would then be used in the research conducted by AMS affiliated professional astronomers. During the decade of the 1980's, this program carried out experiments involving the establishment of meteor radio scatter receiving stations by groups of amateur astronomers, as well as preliminary work in using microcomputers for data collection. Notable successes included the work of William Black (1983) of Florida; Michael Owen (1986) of New York; and Meteor Group Hawaii <http://www.amsmeteors.org/mghawaii/> , led by Michael Morrow and George Pokarney (1987). The most promising results were the experiments performed by Kenneth Pilon (1984), a Canadian amateur, who successfully demonstrated that a TRS-80 personal computer could be used to detect and make graphic printouts of meteor events. Building upon the lessons learned from these previous attempts, the first full-time prototype station for the AMS became operational in March, 1993, utilizing an economical Apple IIe platform for data collection. This station was located in the rural countryside of northwest Florida (Poplar Springs) , and utilizes distant Television Channel 2 transmitters as its signal source. In late 1993, the AMS Radio Scatter Program was reorganized, and became the AMS Radiometeor Project. For several years, efforts were focused upon expanding the network, as well as increasing the reliability and sophistication of each individual station. Three stations were eventually established, located in California, Florida, and Virginia. Professional analysis of the collected data yielded several conference talks and an extensive paper in the European journal Planetary and Space science. By 1998, the data collection computers were significantly obselete to make further operation impractible, and the network of active stations was discontinued at that time. Although the AMS does not currently have an active network of radiometeor stations, the society continues to support amateur efforts in this fascinating aspect of meteor science. For further information, contact James Richardson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> , the former Radio Meteor Project coordinator. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
