Everyday billions of space rocks crash into the earths atmosphere and disintegrate before they reach the ground.
This produces two main effectsone we can see with our eyes, the other we cannot.
Photo credit:Sergiu Bacioiu/Flickr
The second effect, the one which we cannot see, is ionization.
Meteorites even as small as a grain of sand can create columns of ionized air tens of kilometers long.
What if we use this ionization trails to reflect radio waves for long distance communication?
The ionosphere can reflect radio waves of frequencies between 3 to 30 MHz.
Anything higher passes right through the ionosphere.
The JANET projectused a 90 MHz carriersignal to send out short bursts of data over distances exceeding 2,000 km.
The system was operational until about 1960.
Example of Meteor Burst Communications.Image credit.
At some point, a meteor will appear and the signal will be reflected back to the receiving station.
The master station acknowledged back and a handshake is established.
The master channel then goes back to transmitting the probe until the next path is found.
Fortunately, because meteors are so frequent they do not have to wait long.
Longer duration windows, such as 1.6 seconds, however, occur only once every two days.
The major advantage of MBC is they are immune to disruption.
Because of these reasons, MBCs are still used by the military for certain applications.
