Turn your TV set into a Meteor Detector
By Arnie Coro, Host of Dxers Unlimited
Radio amateur CO2KKAdd more TV stations to your log Via Meteors!
Yes my friends! Your TV set can be turned into a very useful high sensitivity meteors detector... all you need to do is follow Arnie Coro's step by step instructions.
You will need to know if your TV set is connected to an external antenna or not. In these days of cable television, there are many households which do no longer use any antenna at all, relaying on a coaxial cable TV provider for 100 percent of the service. If you find out that the TV set does not have an external antenna available... then you should select, buy and then install an outdoor antenna, which should be as high as possible and equipped with an antenna rotor
If the antenna was already installed, then check if it is capable of receiving the LOW BAND TV channels, which in the Americas are located from 54 to 88 megaHertz. In other parts of the world LOW BAND TV may be now non existent,or may have less than 5 channels available.Now you should very carefully verify the state of the downlead, which I will recommend reinstalling if it has been up for more than 2 years. If you are going into the shooting star hunting game, it's a lot better to start with a Class I installation, in which both antenna and feedline are as new as possible. Be extra-careful while installing the connectors to the coaxial cable... because a bad contact between antenna downlead, connector and TV set can be the difference between picking up DX signals refractred by meteor trails, and simply not picking anything at all...
Now that you have the right antenna, with the new downlead, it's time to run a first test of your TV DX installation... Tune slowly for either an empty low band channel, or one with the weakest possible signal. Use your local TV station information, in order to learn which are the weaker stations in you area.. This is important, since you want to pick up far away - DX -signals that are going to be very weak... it will certainly not be possible to pick those DX channels if the local stations are on the air! Also, you may find that of all the available VHF band channels, maybe only one or two is either empty or ir received with a weak signal...You will do your first test very early in the morning, between 3 AM and 6 AM.... Yes you must wake up early or stay up late if you REALLY want to do TV DX via Meteor Scatter!!!
Let's suppose that you are already awake and running the test... it's four o'clock in the morning local time... you tune your TV set to the lowest frequency empty channel available at your location, or if all are in use, you try to find the one delivering the weakest signal... If more than one channel is empty, you should select the LOWEST FREQUENCY one for the tests...Now you have either a blank screen or a very weak signal... The tape inside the VCR is rolling... for several minutes nothing happens BUT SUDDENLY THE SCREEN LIGHTS UP! For a very brief period, ranging from a second or two , to maybe a minute, a TV stations comes in, sometimes more than one TV station is received... YES, you have just received your first signal coming via METEOR SCATTER!!!
Now your TV set + antenna + VCR is working as a METEOR SCATTER DETECTOR...All you need to do is try to identify the stations received... The two operating modes available to the Meteor Scatter enthusiasts are
1. Random Meteors... that hit the Earth's upper atmosphere at anytime of the year... But, that according to experts are more frequent during the very early hours of the morning local time
2. Meteors coming from " showers", that originate when the Earth moves across the orbit of, for example a comet... This is the case of the very famous Leonids Meteor Shower, that is caused by the Tempel-Tuttle comet, it peaked in 1966 with a Meteor Storm of more than one thousand visual sightings per hour... Nov 17 1998 and again sometime around that date in 1998 we will see another Leonids Shower peak... and one of the nicest ways of recording the meteors impacting the ionosphere is by catching TV signals bent back to Earth from the ionized trails left by the meteors as they enter the atmosphere at very high speeds and burn up.
TV DXING via Meteors... one of more than 50 ways in which you can enjoy the radio hobby!
Havana, Cuba
15 November, 1998
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