Wot, no Leonids?

After seeing numerous pings and even managing to complete one 6m JT6M meteor scatter contact during the Perseid meteor shower last August I was hopeful of more success during this month's Leonids. However, despite monitoring 50.230MHz for several hours I have so far seen nothing much.

The screen dump shows what is on my WSJT screen at the time of writing. At 11:37 the G4DDY JO02BEX looks like a snippet of something. However, G4DDY is not known to be active on meteor scatter. A quick peek at ON4KST Chat shows that G4DEZ has been busy on JT6M MS, and his QTH locator is JO03AE. This corresponds closely to what I copied, with a few characters being the 'one down' from what G4DEZ would have been sending. (This makes sense because JT6M is a simple FSK system using close-spaced tones, each tone frequency corresponding to a different character.)

The GW3MEW at 12:20 also looks like a valid callsign, but again not someone who operates 6m MS. However there is a post from GW3LEW on ON4KST Chat, so that is presumably who I was hearing.

There is not much traffic on the chat system at all, which suggests to me that there is not much activity. There may be enough meteors for high powered stations like G4DEZ to make contacts but not enough for me to even bother attempting.

Aircraft scatter on 2m

Whenever I see reports of tropospheric propagation on 144MHz I tune my receiver to the GB3VHF beacon in Kent to see if I can receive it any better than normal. I am always disappointed, because it appears that the mountains of the Lake District block all signals from the south round to the east, except for Sporadic-E which is presumably reflected in at a higher angle.

However, when I monitor the beacon using WSJT in JT65B mode I very often see traces like the one on the right, showing a strong doppler shift on the signal. The traces normally last for no longer than two or three minutes, then it's back to band noise again.

At this QTH when the sky is clear you can always see aircraft trails heading north-south on their way down to London. So I presume that the effect I am seeing is due to aircraft scatter?

I don't suppose it is of much interest to most 2m DX enthusiasts to spend some time trying to work a relatively QRP station in IO84hp square, but from my point of view it would be interesting to try a couple of skeds with other UK stations using, I guess, JT6M, just to see if it is possible to make a contact by bouncing RF off an airliner.

My first meteor-scatter contact

I have been interested in meteors ever since, as a teenager back in the '60s, I and a couple of friends formed a small school astronomy club, joined the British Astronomy Association Meteor section and submitted meteor observations. So ever since I found out about WSJT, JT6M and its potential to enable even low-powered stations to make meteor-scatter (MS) contacts I had been looking forward to the Perseid shower. Unfortunately other matters took priority and I didn't think I was going to have a chance to try anything at all. But I did manage to leave the system on just receiving for a couple of times, and this morning when I saw CQ 236 PA4VHF being sent on 50.230 I could not resist tuning the K3 up to 50.236 and replying to him.

My PA4VHF G4ILO almost immediately produced a response of G4ILO PA4VHF 27 as you can see from the screenshot. It took a couple of minutes before the response to my PA4VHF G4ILO R27 of RRRR PA4VHF was seen on the screen. I replied with 73 G4ILO and immediately saw 73 TNX RRRR PA4VHF come back. That's the last message in the sequence, but I sent a couple of periods of 73 TNX G4ILO for good measure. Then I switched back to 50.230 and saw PA4VHF calling CQ again. It was all over in about six minutes. Not bad for 50W to a dipole using the (allegedly deaf on 6m) Elecraft K3.

I think that's probably my lot for this shower, but at least I can now say I've worked MS! Our contact is already in PA4VHF's 2009 6m JT6M Challenge list; I was a new grid (IO84) for him. Nice!

Meteor scatter by stealth

Whilst receiving the GB3VHF and IT9X beacons using JT65B mode I sometimes noticed a curved trace on the spectrum display. I guess this was a reflection from a meteor trail. This put the idea into my head to see if I could receive some meteor scatter signals on 6m or 2m with my stealth attic antenna system.

It took some research to find out where to listen, and in what mode, as it seems that meteor scatter enthusiasts use different modes (FSK441, JT65M and fast CW) and different frequencies depending on which band you use and whether you are in Europe or the USA. I'm still not sure where to listen for activity on 2 metres, but on 6m it appears that there is a lot of activity using JT6M mode centered on 50.230MHz, so I tuned my K3 to that frequency, started WSJT going and went for my dinner.

On my return, I found that I had bagged CQ calls from two stations, S51YZ and IW1AYD. WSJT thoughtfully stores the received signals as WAV files, so I was able to play back the recordings for those 30-second periods to see and hear what it heard. The program display from IW1AYD's call is shown above. It's a nice example of overdensed meteors according to the examples on Hans Meyer OE1SMC's web page.

This is very exciting and I am interested now to see whether I can make an actual meteor scatter contact using my stealth amateur radio station and indoor dipole with 100W. Before I can do that I need to figure out the correct protocol, as well as how to get the WSJT software to transmit. I don't imagine that people will be queuing up to make skeds with my QRP station (I think 100W counts as QRP in MS terms) but the big Perseids meteor shower is only a few weeks away so I shall probably try to make some random contacts during that. In the meantime, any advice or tips from experts in the mode will be greatly appreciated.