From Ian Shardlow, Lichfield, Staffordshire, UK
Abigail Beall offers tips for observing meteor showers (16 November, p 51). I would like to share an alternative way to see them that works when it is cloudy and even in daylight.
There is a very powerful space surveillance radar station in France called . When a meteor burns up, the trail it leaves behind reflects radio waves. It is possible to pick up these reflected signals across most of Europe.
To see them, I use a wide-band discone antenna on the roof of my garden shed, with a software-defined radio (SDR) inside the shed, controlled by a computer in the comfort of my house. You do need a bit of technical know-how to , because the SDR software lets you change just about everything, and that can be quite confusing.
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