TO THE DXING COMMUNITY AT LARGE
Do you have your FM DX gear all tuned up and ready to chase after some meteor scatter? The Perseids SHOW(er) peaks in ONE WEEK - August 12 & 13.
The preview can be found on YouTube...
https://youtu.be/JruDNHg5WWc
Perseids are known for its high rate of meteors - astronomers call it the ZHR (quantity) - which can typically average 100 per hour on the peak night....to the naked eye!
But wait, we're Dxing the meteors, not visually looking for them. The fellows over at the International Meteor Organization (IMO), the American Meteor Society (AMS), and the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), each calculate (or estimate) there are about 300 *radio* meteors per hour - those are the meteors that make a dent in the ionosphere and cause radio reflections. That's enough to make a FM dxer that lives in a high RF noise environment, where it's very difficult to hear the pings and pops of a Perseids FM signal, consider their alternatives, at least for a weekend night and see what it's all about.
You know - go mobile - take a good portable radio or take your PC and SDR and take a meteor scatter weekend outing somewhere away from the city's radio noise.
You can also enjoy the effects of the Southern delta Aquarids meteor shower and the alpha Capricornids meteor shower, both coinciding with the Perseids run. How would you know you're getting in on any meteor scatter from the Aquarids or Capricornids, with the Perseids having such a high yield?
TIP - the lesser showers, although they have small ZHR counts in comparison to the Perseids, are notorious for fireballs and trains. Why? Because both of the shower's fragments (debris) have very slow entry into the Earth's ionosphere. The facts: The Aquarids average speed is 25 miles/sec (medium); the Capricornids, 14 miles/sec (slow). The Perseids, by comparison, are 37 miles per second (fast). IF you catch a meteor scatter burn that is persistent (lasting for several seconds to minutes) and possibly has multiple signals captured together, you can be 90% + certain that it came from one of the lesser showers. The Perseids just don't do that. They are fast and furious - 3 to 4 second pops and you are lucky if you can get a real identification of the arriving signal.
Would you like to know MORE about the Perseids? Get ALL the details here>>>
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essen...meteor-shower/
This is your alert for the annual, seasonal event - the Perseids - to all seasoned career dxers and those newbie armchair wannabe dxers. The CHASE is on.
Jim Thomas
PS Feel free to post your identified Perseids logs (a list or mp3's) with this announcement, as they happen, or after the meteor shower is over and is history.
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