Silly thought. 802.11 - meteor bounce?

Suggest you do a search for "EME" and "Moonbounce" to see what problems could occur e.g. Latency. Given the speed of meteors what sort of tracking system are you going to use for your Antennas and depending on the direction of the meteors what about the effect of "Doppler Shift"

Ian Stirling hath wroth:

It works but you need short bursts of data, a protocol that can handle large latencies, specialized software, and lots of transmit power. The signal is not bounce off the meteorites, but off the ionization trail in the atmosphere. Search Google for "meteor scatter" for details on how various groups are using this mode of propgation. Note that "high speed" meteor scatter means Morse code at perhaps 5 words per minute average thruput.

Bob II hath wroth:

Meteor scatter does not bounce the signal off the meteorite, but uses the ionization trail, that can persist for a few seconds to several minutes. The meteorite is moving, but the ionization does not move. Therefore, no doppler compensation is required. The trails are long enough to support reflections mostly in the VHF (50-450Mhz) region.

Drivel: It's really a meteoroid while it's still in the atmosphere. It only becomes a meteorite when it hits the ground. When it leaves a bright trail, it's a meteor. If it's a big rock, it's a bolide.

Doppler shift When using meteor scatter or meteor burst communications it is found that the signals that are received are subject to a Doppler shift. This arises because the point where the signal is reflected changes as the meteor moves forwards and new ionisation is created, and the trail behind it diffuses. This can give a shift in frequency of as much as 2 kHz on the higher frequency bands although it is correspondingly lower for the lower frequency bands.

The trails are long

Bob II hath wroth:

I stand corrected. (I just hate it when that happens.) I guess the ionization trail does effectively move.

When I was playing with 26MHz marine meteor scatter on in the late

1970's using Sitor, I didn't compensate for doppler. There was a noticeable smearing of the signal which was caused by doppler, but it didn't seem to affect error rate or data recovery much. The TNC (terminal node controller) did have an AFC which could theoretically compensate for some doppler shift but was far too slow to be useful for doppler compensation. More often, it was just used to compensate for frequency inaccuracy and drift.

Also, the test was a failure because the equipment necessary was impractical, required far too much power, there was too much interference from skip, and the thruput was very depressingly slow (about 2 chars/sec).