Meteor shower

Peaking this coming weekend, the Aquarids meteor shower should bring some strong pings. I shall be on 6m MSK144 RX hoping for success.

The returns from just random meteors have amazed me. With a real MS shower, the pings should be longer, so I have a better chance of copying stations with my very simple set-up (V2000 vertical, lossy coax and FT817).

A new meteor scatter mode

http://www.dk5ew.de/2012/01/13/psk2k-a-new-meteorscatter-mode-by-dj5hg/

This webpage gives details of an interesting high speed MS mode from DK5EW. There is also a Yahoo group to discuss this: see http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/psk2k/

"PSK2k is high speed meteor scatter software written by Klaus DJ5HG (Prof. of Computer Science at University Hamburg).  It allows 2 way MS QSO’s to be conducted with any suitable transceiver/PC/soundcard combination.

PSK2k is fully error correcting and call specific in operation so you will only see the QSO in progress and any non-QSO CQ or QST text. All other transmissions (other people also in QSO) are discarded. This allows multiple QSO’s to take place on a single frequency.

PSK2k can be operated in fully automatic mode if required. This enables QSO’s to be completed fully automatically without user intervention. Important advantages are that long term testing can be done, on QRP power for instance, without having to sit an monitor every period."

Geminids meteor shower tonight

This evening the Geminids meteor shower should peak between 2000 and 2200z in the UK.  As there is no moon visible and the sky should be reasonably clear it could be a fine sight. Increased meteor activity should allow European DX on bands like 50MHz and 144MHz by meteor scatter (MS). Best place to listen/look is on 50.230MHz in JT6m mode.