I finally had a chance to listen to the recording I made
of two VHF radio frequencies that could help indicate if
anything big fell in to the Earth's atmosphere a week ago
Saturday. A person I know in town, here, said that he had been
outside at about 3:30 to 3:45 in the morning US-Central Daylight
(Summer) time. He saw a big shooting star or something and
wondered whether or not it was a piece of the satellite. I am
thinking that it is not likely because it was suspected that the
satellite burned up over the North Pacific between Midnight and
03:00 Eastern time which is an hour ahead of Central.
One of the frequencies I had tuned in was 55.240 MHZ
which is one of the video carrier frequencies of TV Channel 2 in
the Americas. The other frequency around 218 MHZ is a project by
the US Air Force. This is an unclassified radar system that
sends several steady carrier signals straight up in to the sky
in a belt roughly across the Central United States. Airplanes
and satellites passing overhead reflect some of the signal back
to Earth and one can listen for those reflections.
When a satellite hits the beam, the steady carrier
appears to drift in frequency because of the Doppler effect so
what you hear is a note that appears that rises or drops in
pitch before disappearing a few seconds later.
If the object is a meteor/piece of space junk, it
creates ionization which makes it reflect even more. The Doppler
effect is really strong and the whole thing is over in maybe a
quarter of a second. The sound you hear is like the slide
whistle in a cartoon when somebody gets bopped on the head or
punched in the face. There is no thump afterward, but the
whistle is pretty funny to hear.
Anyway, the radios were just hissing quietly at that
time of day when suddenly, the one tuned to the radar system
made one of those absurd cartoon whistles. A fraction of a
second later, the receiver tuned to the television video carrier
frequency received a brief burst of carrier from somewhere,
probably Mexico, and then everything went quiet again. It was
all over in about 2 seconds.
The satellite probably would have taken much longer to
burn up and there would have been even more cool whistles, but
that meteor or whatever it was was pretty good.
I'm glad I didn't stay up all night for that, but it was
interesting to correlate that report by the person who did see
something burn up with the reflected signals on the radio.
Even if you happen to be blind, you can enjoy meteor
showers and anything else that falls in to the atmosphere and
burns up somewhere overhead.
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