So I have been doing Meteor Scatter for a long time, it is a lot of fun and challenging at times. If anyone has wanted to try it this is your thread. If you are setup to run FT8 on HF and you have a small beam or 6m dedicated dipole then you are already setup for it. Meteor scatter on 6m can be done with only 100w or less. The more gain you have the better but I have worked stations on their HF Dipole and less than 100w.

I have a smaller station on 6m with a 5el LFA that is still too low to the ground. I ran for years with a Par Electronics Stressed Moxon and 100w on my Icom 7300. With Meteor scatter you can complete contacts from about 450 miles to 1000 miles with ease on a small beam and barefoot radio. During meteor showers it is much easier to work stations, but the reality is every day there are plenty of rocks coming in and burning up. Each morning and evening there are dedicated stations on and sending RF. If you have WSJT get on in the prime time in the morning and evening and switch to MSK144 as the mode on 6m. Almost all the activity will be on 50.260 and let the rig listen and you will be surprised on what you decode. If you have worked 6m FT8 and you see a weak trace that has the occasional strong burst that sounds like a sonar ping, that is a meteor burst that enhanced the propagation path.

I am here to help anyone that wants to give this a try. We have another station that is not on the forum, but very active in the ARFCOM 556 DMR, he has a really massive station that can hear things my station would only dream of. So if you want to try some interesting propagation mode and pick up more grids on 6M this is the way to do it.

2M Meteor scatter is much more challenging, and takes more metal in the air and more power. I have completed contacts with an Arrow 4el yagi and 50w when I first got started but it takes a lot more time. Many stations are running large beams and legal limit on 2m to make it happen, but it is not needed most of the time if you have patience. So if this is something that interests you then ask some questions. If you live within 700 miles of VA and all you have is a Dipole and an HF radio with 6M, and want to give it a try let me know and we can squedule a try. Most of the guys coordinate on the Ping Jockey web page so we can coordinate sequences and aim our antennas at each other.

Sequences are 15-30 seconds where one station transmits and the other listens and then they switch, much like FT8. There is an stardard on what stations transmit on the even or odd blocks. If you are pointing east, to the station you are trying to call is east, you transmit on even time slots. West would be odd time blocks, so the 15 and 45 second time blocks. That is really about it, so get on and make some RF and ask questions!

(Where’s that ‘like button’ when you need it? )

Last year I did a lot of monitoring on 6m MSK144 with interesting results - but I noticed from time to time that there were some very loud signals that I could not decode, likely from ‘locals’ within perhaps 20 or 30 miles of my QTH.

Have you experienced that? I’m wondering whether it could have been due to multipath, but I’m not sure how to determine that - maybe WSJT-X may have internal diagnostics that I’m not familiar with that could help. IIRC reducing the rf gain and/or the af gain did not help, so my guess was that it was unlikely to be a receiver overload or IMD problem or audio chain overload, but I did not do extensive testing so perhaps with further experimentation I might have been able to fix things.

A few years ago I worked a lot of MSK144 6 meter meteor scatter. I lost interest when I had worked about everything I could work state and province wise within range. You can get on the pingjockey website and see who is available and give it a try.

Once in a while you would see a combination of meteor pings and E skip in the summer months. Those made for some interesting contacts.

It was one of those things I was hot and heavy into for a while and now haven't messed with for some time.

Could be multi path but there has to be some settings to help with the decodes, like the TOL should be set to 200. Watch the RX % bar in the lower right while adjusting the TOL to make sure the CPU is not struggling to decode. Also set up the VHF tools on WSJT-x and set the decode to deep.