You can bounce a signal off a shooting star
2026-05-30 · EA5IYR
Roughly a hundred kilometres above you, right now, something the size of a grain of sand is hitting the atmosphere at tens of kilometres per second and burning up.
It leaves behind a column of ionised air — plasma, briefly, several kilometres long. And for a fraction of a second, that column will reflect radio.
This happens tens of millions of times a day. Which means it is not a curiosity. It is infrastructure. What a burst looks like
A trail forms in a few hundred microseconds and then fades as the electrons disperse. Most last a few tenths of a second. A good one lasts several seconds. Very occasionally you get one that holds for the better part of a minute and everybody on the band talks about it for a week.
While it is there, it will support a path between stations up to about 2,250 km apart — roughly the geometry you get from a mirror at that altitude.
Then it is gone, and you wait. How you use something that lasts half a second
By being ready, and by being brief.
Amateur operators do it on 6 and 2 metres, mostly with digital modes designed for exactly this: fixed-length messages, heavy error correction, and transmissions timed so that both stations are alternating in short bursts. You point antennas at a shared piece of sky and let the software collect a contact one fragment at a time.
Meteor showers make it easy. But you do not need one: the sporadic background is enough, and dawn is better than dusk because the Earth's leading side sweeps up more of them. The part that surprises people
This was a serious commercial technology.
The US Department of Agriculture ran SNOTEL, a network of over 700 remote snowpack sensors across the western United States, and for more than forty years those stations sent their readings home by bouncing them off meteor trails. It held the record as the largest meteor burst network in the world. It was retired in 2023.
The logic was sound. The sites are in mountains, far from anything, and a system that needs no repeaters, no satellite subscription and no line of sight — only patience and the fact that space keeps throwing gravel at us — is a genuinely good answer. Hearing one without any equipment
The easiest demonstration costs nothing. Tune an FM radio to a frequency where you hear only noise, ideally at the low end of the band, and leave it on during a meteor shower.
Every so often a distant station will appear for a second or two and vanish. That is a trail, forming and dispersing directly overhead, doing the same thing the ionosphere does on a longer timescale — except this one you can attribute to a specific object that no longer exists.
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Sources: Wikipedia — meteor burst communications, Electronics Notes — meteor scatter communications, ARRL — a beginner's guide to meteor scatter (PDF), Guinness World Records — largest meteor burst communications network.