In a follow up to my recent post about lightning scatter at 1296 MHz, Kadri TA1D got in touch to say that he saw another example at 144 MHz. He wrote a post about it on his blog in Turkish and that is linked from the bottom of this post.
He has kindly given me permission to publish a version in English here. I'm using Google Translate for most of this post with a few corrections so a few errors may creep in.
John, EI7GL
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Contribution of lightning to Radio Communications at 144 MHz ...by TA1D
Towards the end of summer 2021, I was operating from my summer QTH station in the North Aegean in Turkey / Turkiye. It was raining with lightning one day when I was communicating with Meteor Scatter on 144 MHz and I decided to check if the SV2JL/B beacon station in Greece on 144.450 MHz could be heard during the hours when lightning was concentrated in the middle of the Aegean Sea.
I turned my antenna to the west and started listening on 144.450 MHz. At that time, the sound of the CW beacon could be very faintly heard with some fading (QSB). Sometimes it became unreadable and rose again, but overall, the signal level was very poor.
While I was listening, I also had the computer monitoring with the MSK144 mode and sometimes, the morse signal appeared clearly on the screen as short and long lines.
I noticed that I was also hearing the static crashes from the lightning and these can be seen on the screen shot above.
I noticed that I could hear the radio signals of SV2JL/B very faintly during each lightning strike. When the static crash was at a red level, the morse signals became loudly audible before dropping back down to a lower level.
I realised that I had witnessed an interesting physical event and it was possible due to my position and situation.
Is it of any use to radio amateurs? Yes, it can be useful. We can make use of meteor scatter with the MSK and FSK modes to make contacts using short pings and bursts. We could also make use of the short scatter signals from lightning strikes.
Thanks to lightning, we are listening and sending like meteor scatter communications. Lightning strikes at the appropriate angle between the two stations during our meteor scatter style QSOs may help us communicate.
In conclusion; This physical phenomenon that I have noticed and determined can be effective in amateur radio communication.
There may be articles written by people who witnessed similar events on different web pages, but I have not come across them yet.
Meteorite: Pieces of Stone, Soil, mineral and ice floating or orbiting in space.
MSK and FSK: Digital communication mode
Beacon: Radio Beacon, Robot station that sends Morse or digital signals at certain intervals.
CW: Morse signal, carrier wave
RF: Radio Frequency
SV2JL/B: Robot Beacon station installed in Greece
APS: Airplane Scatter: Reflection and scattering from the aircraft surface.
TA1D Kadri K.Mehmet Başak
Links...
1) The full original article is on the TA1D website... http://ta1d.com/?p=226
