GB3MBA · 50.408 MHz · forward scatter
Sherwood Meteor Zoo
This is the simple one-answer version. The main site lets you box each echo separately. See what the network has measured.
Six UK receivers listen to one beacon. When a meteor burns up, it bends that signal for a fraction of a second. Help us find them.
Two minutes of training first. Every picture below is a real meteor, confirmed by cameras on the ground — so you are learning from the genuine article, not a drawing.
First, what you are looking at
Six seconds of radio
The newest moment is at the top, the way the live display scrolls, so the picture reads upward in time. Across is frequency — how far the echo is shifted from the beacon's own note.
A meteor racing towards the receiver returns a higher note, so it smears sideways in a fraction of a second. The glowing trail it leaves behind sits still at the centre and stretches into a vertical line. Either way it draws a line, never a dot.
Two things are ours, not the sky's. A bright band repeating exactly once a second, six or seven times up the picture, is our clock pulse. It is far wider than a meteor streak and usually spans most of the picture, so it is hard to miss once you know it. A steady line straight down the middle is the beacon itself. Neither is ever a meteor.
The four shapes worth telling apart
Spotter—
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Result
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In this demo every clip has a known answer, so you get told each time.