Meteor signals on RBOOM

Meteor airburst detection seems like a major use-case, but without sophisticated software with wind-models and a somewhat dense network of infrasound sensors to corroborate detection, any local noise can easily be mistaken for signal. Heck, I’m not sure we even know what a meteor airburst signal would look like on RBOOM.

One strong possibility would be combining data from existing infrasound arrays; to be fair the results would probably mostly echo the existing arrays, but at least this would let people locate known events on their RBOOM. However, I don’t know if such data is even public anywhere, for example, the infrasound event catalog at http://ds.iris.edu/spud/infrasoundevent ends in 2015. It also seems like we might have used up the quota of major airburst events for this century, but, knock on wood, don’t want those near any major population center.

Worthy of very special mention is https://globalmeteornetwork.org/ which is an amateur network of meteor cameras … connected to Raspberry Pi, which is used for automatic visual detection of meteors and fireballs. It should be possible to correlate at least some nearby events with infrasound signals. Unfortunately, I don’t have a meteor camera. I’m not really sure how far away I should expect it to be possible to pick infrasound, but the further away it is, the larger the timing uncertainty.

Another popular method of meteor detection to correlate with infrasound is radio-signals http://www.livemeteors.com/how-does-this-work - again, this could be done with an RTL dongle on a RPi, so it’s on my list of things to try. I want to use RTL for ADS-B aircraft (Another source of infrasound!) tracking and GNSS-TEC measurements and have no idea how to combine all three into one.

I actually just noticed https://www.meteornews.net/2018/10/15/meteor-detection-by-infrasound-method/ mentions RBOOM and has some of the pics uploaded on these forums.

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livemeteors.com is the coolest thing I’ve seen this week.

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here is a lightweiight presentation on Meteor booms

The microphone used in the ELFO array is a nice one indeed. I think it is about 1000 times more sensitive than the RBOOM https://www.bksv.com/media/doc/bp2214.pdf

I imagine the cost of that microphone is beyond reach of most home boomers… but most folks would not have a quiet enough site to make any use of such a thing.

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