UK Meteor Radar Project

Hello Folks

The beacon will be operating from my home location, 51d14m 53.1s N , 1d 34m 15.6s W IO91FF19 as an attended beacon, under the terms of my licence. This means I need to switch it OFF if I am away from the site. I will also be taking it out of service from time to time so I can work on it for the last few adjustments and changes before I pack the transmitter and antenna for transport to Sherwood. So it will be OFF from the 9th May until installed on 14th or 15th May when it will be commissioned if all goes to plan.
All reports of echoes, including a spectrogram, would be very much appreciated and would make all the work building the beacon worthwhile. I might even come up with a first light certificate. Reports from greatest distance are particularly helpful. Also please could you check your background noise level ie level change with antenna vs 50 Ohm load in dBs. If you have a quiet site perhaps you could join the proposed receiver network when the receivers are designed. We have funding to design these and build the first 2 or 3 for deployment to suitable radio quiet locations to stream their data to a central server for access by all. Especially those not favoured with a quiet location. Brian G4NNS

Brian

Please find attached a screengrab of my console from yesterday (4th May 2022) showing (inter alia) the simultaneous reception of a burst via GRAVES and GB3MBA in its temporary test location.

When my system is online I monitor GRAVES a "50MHz" beacon (hitherto it has generally been BRAMS on 49.97MHz), but I have retuned my receiver to the new UK frequency for this grab.

It will be interesting (to me anyway) to note how many "coincident" echoes are received once the UK beacon is in its final location.

I am in Penrith (Grid IO84pp) and the aerial is a home made "Moxon" in my loft aligned approximately SE.

I hope you are as pleased with this result as I am! (I have annotated the result hopefully to clarify what is being seen).

Many thanks for your (and others' of course) efforts, I for one have been looking forward to having the option to use a UK source for quite some time

Regards

Martin (G4FUI)

Hello Martin
Great stuff and thanks for the report. When we were testing the proof of concept Web RX system I saw echoes from BRAMS VVS on 49.440 and our test beacon which was then at Andy's location ( G4JNT ). So I expect we will see quite a few coincident echoes with the Belgium beacons and a few from Graves. This morning I'm doing some work on the beacon but hope to put it back on later .. check the status page. Over the week end I'll start dismantling the antenna for transport to Sherwood next week end.

I will be particularly interested in head echoes like the one I have ( hopefully ) attached as these are what we will need to triangulate meteor events and calculate trajectories / radiants.
All the best Brian

I have just seen the beacon come up!

I spotted this morning that it was on, but probably running into dummy load (on but no dump power), so I started my receiver as I figured that the gues were on site, and doing the antenna connection ...

A short while later, there is a little bit of power in the dump load, (i.e. probably connected to a "real" antenna), an lo and behold I am getting a nice direct signal here in Penrith, with quite a lot of a/c reflections (as I expected) and some meteor pings.

Well done you guys, and kudos to the Mansfield & Sutton AS , and the "Mexborough lot" for collaborating to get this thing flying!

All the very best to all concerned ...

Martin (G4FUI)