Meteor-bounce Communications

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Dwayne asks about meteor-bounce communications:

> >technique extends the idea of bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere (for
> >distance), to bouncing off the atmospheric trails of micro meteors. 
> 
> Are these particularly common? Or only when there are meteor showers...

The micro-meteors are frequently showering the earth...I seem to
recall most systems having to wait on the order of tens of seconds for
a suitable trail to appear (and then only for fractions of a second).

The transmitters have to be "opportunistic," waiting for a suitable
ionization trail and then blasting away for the few hundred
milliseconds the trail is active.

I think trucks are big users of this system, that is, radio
communication with home bases. The data rates don't have to be high,
and the sporadic, opportunistic nature is OK.

(The same would apply to Net-type communications, of a personal sort,
but not the backbone links, of course.)

Qualcomm builds truck systems that use other techniques, so perhaps
Phil can comment on the current status of meteor-bounce comm systems.

--Tim May


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