Digital TV - via meteor scatter

[w9wi]

James Pizzi near Rochester, New York reported receiving WHBF-TV, channel 4 (both RF & PSIP) Rock Island, Illinois last night. Via meteor scatter. (refraction by the ionized trails left by burning meteorites)

Meteor scatter results in brief blips of distant signals. On FM, a second or two of music on an otherwise empty channel. Larger "burns" may last longer.

I don't recall hearing of anyone else receiving a digital TV signal via meteor scatter. One major *advantage* of digital.. is that the Virtual Channel Table is transmitted frequently, and (usually) contains the station's call letters. So you don't have to hope they just happen to run an ID during a meteor burst.

(I've been monitoring FM fairly frequently during last week's meteor shower. Heard a TON of bursts -- every one of them containing music. Not one ID -- not even a burst of commercial...)

[NECRAT]

I've only heard one station via meteor scatter, and that was one from Baltimore, MD. The Meteor scatter signal hit when the ID was airing.
Other than that, it's always just been music bits.

For DTV decoding, you would need a very fast DTV PSIP decoder. My main TV set has one.

[Deep Thought]

There is a guy out west who monitors "vacant" VHF TV frequencies to detect meteors (and with great success) so I don't know why a DTV signal would not be able to reflect intact long enough to ID it.

[billcroghan]

A ham buddy in COlorado springs swears he works great distances working reflections off the airplanes in the stack to land at Denver. He's pretty reliable and into moon bounce so probably has the gear to do it.
Bill

[w4cl]

dxfm.com has a channel 2 spectrum analyzer on line that does pick up meteor scatter. Cool stuff to watch.