The Geminid meteor shower peaked on Friday night. Unfortunately I'm not yet in a position to be able to monitor GRAVES 24/7. So I was only able to start recording data from around 07:13 GMT the next morning (it was a Saturday and really hard to drag myself out of bed!). I used my usual setup of a 4 element yagi (vertical pol) orientated about SW in direction and 10 degrees above horizontal (on my wheelie bin!) with a preamp feeding my RTLSDR receiver. For the first couple of hours there was near constant meteor activity, but by lunchtime it had trailed off into normal levels. This can be seen from the following images:
Below are some (a very small fraction) of the events in much greater detail (in the following images the y-axis (time) is relative to the start of the block I reprocessed, not to the start of observation):
Its interesting to see that a number of the events have very complex Doppler profiles. I'll be starting to think about how to investigate this behaviour further over Xmas (multiple coherent antennas?....). I also think there must be a better way to present the data. The other thing I'm working on is an automatic detection & classification system - but that may take a little time.
I've not yet finished making the oscillator improvement to my RTLSDR dongles, so they still drift like crazy with temperature changes. I know there are other ways to improve the thermometer like behaviour - like stuffing them in a drainpipe filled with foam - but as this isn't (yet) a permanent set up its not practical solution. Using a new (external) oscillator with the dongles also may allow them to be phase locked to each other allowing phased arrays to be used.
Really looking forward to the next big meteor shower - especially if I've got my 24/7 monitoring working!
