Topband: Straws in the Wind ....A 160m Dx'ing Sea Change is Upon us!

[Wes Stewart]

Sounds like SNOTEL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOTEL

In 1976, the ARRL SW Division convention was held here in Tucson. The local club 
sponsor hadn't done anything toward serious VHF programs, so Steve, then W7RUC, 
now W7CI, and yours truly, arranged a VHF breakfast meeting at the convention 
hotel.  At personal expense we sent letters to all of the Tropo/MS/EME guys we 
could think of inviting them to the breakfast.  For speakers, we got Mike, 
K6MYC, to talk about antenna design and another guy, whose, to my regret, name 
escapes me, to speak about MS propagation.  His talk was about his company's 
involvement in a similar (if not the same) program. He had tons of data on 
meteor bursts, most of them shorter that we used on CW and SSB at the time.

Wes  N7WS

ps. Reportedly, our meeting was the hit of the convention.

On 3/31/2018 10:40 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist wrote:
> This is an interesting discussion related to FT8.
>
> In 1973 (a whole 45 years ago!) when I worked for Boeing Electronic Products 
> in Seattle, they had a commericial (not ham radio) meteor
> scatter station.  An ASR-33 at the master station in Seattle would send what 
> amounted to "CQ" to a system of slave receivers connected to rain gauge 
> sensors (they do get a bit of rain in Seattle :-) around the Pacific 
> Northwest.  If a particular rain gauge sensor picked up pings from meteor 
> trials, it would immediately transmit its data back,
> presumably while the trial was still hot.  If the trail went cold, the slave 
> would get another chance the next time a meteor came. So this ASR-33 would 
> just print data as it came in at random times.  There may have been a DEC 
> PDP-11 involved (there were no microprocessors at the time unless you count 
> pocket calculators, and the HP35 wasn't
> programmable).
>
> I don't know much FT8, but this legacy system sounds a lot like
> FT8.  Automatic QSO'ing, like the floating FT8 station out of
> Hawaii.  Waiting for the teletype to fire up every few minutes
> while it earned "worked all rain gauges" was more like watching paint dry than 
> having "fun".  They did need to have an "operator" at the master station to 
> change the paper in the teletype once in a while.
>
> Rick N6RK