1998 Leonids Ham Radio Observations

This is the Observations on 1998 Leonids with receiving 50MHz Ham Radio beacon.

It is known that trains of meteor refrect radio wave. So observation on the echoes from meteors shows meteor's activity. Some Japanese amateur antronomers observe meteors with 50MHz Ham Radio beacon. This method is called Ham Radio Observation (HRO).

JA9YDB which is located Fukui 300km away from my location is transmitting beacon on 50MHz. I received the beacon as echoes from Leonids. The echoes are converted to spectrograph with FFTDSP which is a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) program using real-time Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) by Mike Cook, AF9Y.

The following pictures are the results of my HRO on Leonids from 15UTC 16 Nov to 05UTC 17 Nov. You can see long echoes from long-enduring trains which are the feature of Leonids. Long echoes interfere with counting the number of meteors, but I guess it might be storm.

The right is a sample picture.
The left number is local time(JST). The left bar graph shows S/N level of echos.

15UTC 16 Nov (00JST)
16UTC 16 Nov (01JST)
17UTC 16 Nov (02JST)
18UTC 16 Nov (03JST)
19UTC 16 Nov (04JST)
20UTC 16 Nov (05JST)
21UTC 16 Nov (06JST)
22UTC 16 Nov (07JST)
23UTC 16 Nov (08JST)
00UTC 17 Nov (09JST)
01UTC 17 Nov (10JST)
02UTC 17 Nov (11JST)
03UTC 17 Nov (12JST)
04UTC 17 Nov (13JST) the Leo goes down

　RIG: FT-726、ANT：Hentenna (loop antenna)

JN1GKZ Masahiro Arai 　　jn1gkz@jamsat.or.jp