Meteor science @ Urania

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What is (was) the RAMSES project?

RAMSES was a fully automated radio meteor forward scatter set-up based at the Urania Public Observatory in Belgium. The RAMSES project consisted of the development of the set-up on one hand, and the analysis of the radio meteor scatter theory on the other.

Urania has been an active meteor observing center for more than 20 years now, with an explicit accent on visual observations. In 1988, we started manual radio observations. Thanks to a large group of young amateur astronomers at the observatory, we were able to observe about 50000 meteor reflections in hundreds of hours of listening between 1988 and 1992. With a pen recorder, we recorded about 80000 additional meteors.

The automatization of the set-up was performed in 1992, when a dedicated measuring computer was added. This was the beginning of the RAMSES project (RAdio Meteor Survey, Extended System). The set-up has worked for some years, but in the fall of 1995, lightning blew it up. For the development of a new set-up, we worked together with the radio engineering department of the "De Nayer Instituut" in Mechelen. However, this development failed, and no usable set-up was built.

Since then, the FM-transmitters in Eastern Europe that we used have shut down, and we thus have no suitable transmitters any more for some future set-up. Around 1996, we also stopped most of our theoretical work, mainly due to time pressure from our professional careers.

The Goal of the Project

By developing the set-up and by analyzing the theory of meteor scatter, we wanted to develop standards for amateur forward scatter set-ups, and to explore the limits of the technique for amateur observers. We also wanted to gain the necessary experience in order to be able to help other radio meteor enthusiasts.

The Setup

Unfortunately, we cannot describe the current system, as there isn't any since the fatal lightning, but this is how the old one looked like:

The set-up consisted of a crossed 5 element Yagi, aimed horizontally at the east. The receiver was home-made, and based on a TV tuner. It was very sensitive, but had some design errors in it. The receiver was tuned on 66.39 MHz, to receive East European FM stations. The signal strength was fed to a 12 bit A/D card through a simple low-pass filter, and sampled at 200 measurements per second. Sudden signal enhancements were detected by a computer program and the profiles of these peaks in the signal were stored on the hard disk.
In a new set-up, we would mount the antenna vertically, probably use a transformed commercial FM receiver, and sample the signal at about 1000 measurements per second, in order to be able to analyze the Fresnel oscillations in the signal. The whole set-up would be calibrated. The observations would be stored on DAT tape.

The Ramses Physics Section

In order to be able to interpret the observations of the RAMSES set-up in a scientific way, a group of science students and graduates was formed to analyze the theory. This group was called the "Ramses Physics Section," RPS for short.

A great amount of professional literature was gathered. We now have over 550 articles and books about radio meteors. An index to this library was made: the Ramses Literature DataBase. It can be consulted through Internet.

We had regular meetings, where we discussed the practical and theoretical problems we each encounter while working on radio meteors. Sometimes one of the members prepared a text about one specific aspect and gave a lecture about it. We discussed problems like the reflection mechanisms of radio waves on meteor trails, antenna theory, elimination of interference, the probability of observation of radio meteors, the handling of the data, the simulation of radio meteor events, the determination of the parameters of an ideal set-up,...

You can read the yearly reports here.

The RAMSES Team

The team working on all this was not strictly defined, but the following people were core members of the RAMSES team:

Werner Depoorter: hardware, software, theory.
Tom Roelandts: software.
Cis Verbeeck: theory.
Bob Verhaegen: general interest.
Jean-Marc Wislez: theory, public relations, coordination.

RAMSES also has its own e-mail address: ramses@urania.be.

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