Communicating Via Space Dust

klieber writes: "Never mind IP over Avian Carriers, here's a company that really sends data over space dust. Transfer rates are up to 20Kbps but because the data is transferred in short, sporadic bursts, the usable transfer rate is more like 9600bps. (And it uses a proprietary protocol, not IP) The technology, called "Meteor Burst," has been around since the 1930's and was apparently first developed for the U.S. Military. It's now being targeted at vehicle positioning systems and is being used by a private ambulance company in the Pacific Northwest." This is ... really strange.

Comments

Re: YOU can do it at home too!

[deglr6328]

just tune any quality FM reciever to a dead area(no signal and quiet) at the lowest freq. you can; and listen close. you might hear something like this.

for an explanation of whats going on and a link to NASA's radio meteor detection system at Marshall Space Flight Center go here: http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatte r.html

Hams do this all of the time

[Bruce Perens]

Hams do meteor scatter all of the time. The principle is that when a particle hits the atmosphere, the trail of superheated air behind it is ionized, and reflects radio signals back to the ground.

The reflecting surface lasts a few seconds. Because it's not suitable for voice, hams usually use very high speed Morse code, much faster than you could send by hand, sent by computer and read off a video display. Two way communications work this way: one party sends their message repeatedly over one minute on the odd minutes, the other party sends on the even minutes. The odds are that during that minute there's a meteor where you want one and the message gets through.

Thanks

Bruce

Meteor Scatter is an old ham radio game

[isdnip]

Yes, this is an old trick. Whenever there's a meteor shower (a few days of increased activity, when Earth passes near the residue of a comet; this happens a few times a year on schedule) a lot of ham operators point their VHF (2 meter or 70 cm CW, typically) antennas at it and bounce signals off of the tails. Not exactly the meat of long conversations, but a nice way to get some well-beyond-the-horizon contacts into the logbook (think "radiosport"; we do it for the challenge, often competitively).

I suppose if you throw enough at it, you can find enough tiny meteors to make it a fairly regular means of communications. But it's rarely the medium of choice, what with dirt-cheap geostationary satellite bandwidth for the sites that can't get to the fiber networks.

Not all that unusual

[Vassily Overveight]

This is ... really strange.

Well, not really. Back in the olden days when I was a lad, long before commsats and optical fibers, we used to use High Frequency radio for long-distance communications. The signals bounce off of the ionosphere. Meteor Burst is essentially the same thing, except that you're waiting for that momentary ionization trail created by a descending meteor to bounce the signal. I worked on a military project that was using MB. The trail lasts a brief time and is random, but there are so many meteors hitting the atmosphere in a day, that it was seldom more than a few minutes before we got an open path to burst our data. The challenge was, we were doing this at the dawn of the microprocessor age and it was quite the software triumph to set up our little beacon/burster program in 2048 bytes.

Looks like marketing BS to me

[Gorobei]

It is the fact that the system is not susceptible to disturbances or unauthorized listeners which makes MB communications attractive for military communication systems, where it has been in operation for years.

Not susceptible to unauthorized listeners? Huh?! It's just standard broadcast.

The rest of the page talks about a mixed-mode (line-of-sight + meteor burst) operation. I bet they never implement the meteor burst aspect: it's just a hook for customers and investors. Ordinary phone technology would do as well or better.

The most useful low-bandwidth services

[shalunov]

GPS uses 50bps half-duplex broadcast transmission to achieve quite amazing results. GLONASS uses similarly low bit-rate with essentially the same results. WAAS uses 250bps.

What interesting things, besides positioning, can be done with low bit-rate channels?

Moonbounce is ... really strange

[geirt]

This is ... really strange.

Meteor scatter isn't that strange, since the space dust ionizes the atmosphere. Moonbounce on the other hand is ... really strange.

In moonbounce you use the moon as a passive reflector. Google has more info.

How it works:

[autocracy]

Hard hit = binary 1
Soft hit = binary

Of course, everything in nature is basically analog, so hard and soft hits have to be defined in analog terms just like bits in computers - but if it really hurts it's a 1.

My karma's bigger than yours!

In related news, Arcom stock has jumped

[eclectro]

significantly on the news that they will be offering an additional service at the the begining of March.

This new service will be called "Mir Burst". A spokesman for the company said that while meteor burst gives only milliseconds to send data packets, it's expected that the burning trail of the russian space station Mir will give them as much as an half of an hour of reliable highspeed data capability.

When asked about the temporary nature of Mir Burst, the spokesperson said that they were in negotiations with other satellite companies to move obsolete communications equipment into lower earth orbit so that they too could re-enter the atmosphere and provide fleet communications.