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

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.