2002 Leonid Meteor Shower
Radio Observations
Fairly simple radio observations of the November, ’02 Leonid meteor shower were made beginning at 03:57Z on November 19, 2002 ((10:57 PM EST, 18 November, 2002).
The equipment consisted of an Icom IC-R-8500 receiver, a Radio Shack FM broadcast beam antenna and a computer with a sound card. The antenna was positioned at an angle of 45 degrees from horizontal and pointed in the general direction of Richmond, VA which is beyond the radio horizon for this location (about 50 miles NW of Washington, DC).
The receiver was set to 83.25 MHz (The picture carrier frequency of TV Channel 6) and the mode was set to Upper Side Band (USB).
The "Goldwave" program was employed to acquire the audio output from the receiver via a PC and Sound card.
9 hours of data was recorded and analysis continues at present. All types of reflections described on the American Meteor Society page
http://www.amsmeteors.org/audio/index.html were observed. Rates well in excess of 15 events per minute were observed.A 3-minute sample (about 3 MB file) can be found at:
http://www.radio-science.com/Leonids_02/190958z_03.wav
Further comments will be posted as time allows.