How to Hear Meteors on Your FM Radio

You can hear meteor pings and long meteor bursts with just about any decent FM radio. A radio with a digital tuner is very helpful so you know exactly what frequency you are listening to. A decent home stereo AM/FM should work fine. Boom box type radios don't usually work very well for this. Car radios actually work great for this. I have gone out to watch meteors and used the car radio many times, watching the meteors and hearing them on the car radio.

To hear more meteor pings, a small outdoor directional beam antenna works well. A good small antenna is the FM-6 made by AntennaCraft. Since the FM band starts where the old analog channel 6 is, a VHF TV antenna will work (channels 2 thru 12). Since moving to digital television, you might be able to find an old VHF only TV antenna that someone wants to get rid of.

The antenna doesn't have to be very high; 15 to 20 feet (4.57 to 6.1 meters) above the ground works fine. You can support the antenna with antenna mast from Radio Shack or some other support. Putting it along side the house or patio roof works fine. Just make sure you don't put this near any power lines or you could be electrocuted if it should fall. You will also need some coaxial cable to connect the antenna to the radio. This will be 75-ohm cable, which you can also get at Radio Shack or at other electronic stores on the Internet. You can buy the coax with connectors already on at places like Radio Shack, Best Buy or the Internet or coax without the connectors and put your own F connectors on.

You might want the ability to rotate the antenna to different directions. If you have the mast on the ground, you can just turn the mast by hand. If you put it on the roof, you would have to climb up there when you wanted to turn it or buy a rotator, or you could keep it in a good position towards the area where most stations would be.

Once everything is up you will want to get familiar with your local FM band. Get a guide that lists all of your local FM stations. You wont be able to use those frequencies. Go across the FM band and record the stations you hear that aren't in your area, you will hear a number of them that are 100 or more miles away. You wont be able to use those frequencies either. Find the clearest frequencies and those are the ones you will want to stay to listen for meteors.

During a meteor shower, listen to the clear frequencies and you will hear very short "pings" that last from a second to a few seconds. Other times you will hear a distant station for over a minute. You will also hear numerous stations at the same time. Radio station signals will bounce off of these ionized meteor trails and that is what you will hear. Sometimes you will hear enough to identify a station. If your FM radio has RDS in it and if the meteor burst is long enough, the RDS readout might identify the station for you. Meteors are more prevalent in the early morning hours, but of course some meteor showers can peak in the middle of the day.

If you want to get into this hobby more seriously, there are some radios that are better than others. I have used a factory car radio out of a Chevy Blazer and it has worked great, car radios usually have very good sensitivity and can be found cheap. Many times someone will take out the factory radio and install an aftermarket car stereo. You can find these factory car radios very cheap at garage sales, flea markets and online. You can start with an AM/FM radio you already have, hook it to an outdoor antenna and give it a try.

Other radios that are popular with hobbyist are the Denon TU-1500, Sony XDR-F1HD and the Sangean HDT-1. Some people modify the Denon by taking out the factory filters and putting in narrower filters. This helps the selectivity of the radio so you can hear distant stations right next to frequencies that local stations are on.

The hobby of listening to distant FM radio stations is popular and is called FM DX'ing. DX stands for distance.

If you invest in an FM antenna and radio, you don't have to use them to listen to only meteors. During the spring and summer months, you can also listen to distant FM stations with a type of propagation that is called sporadic E.

In the northern hemisphere, the sporadic E season usually starts in mid May and can go until September. In the southern hemisphere it occurs around the December 21 solstice. Something ionized the E layer of the ionosphere, which reflects VHF radio signals at distances up to 1,200 miles and sometimes more. So far, no one knows what causes this. There has been speculation that the sun, sunspots or thunderstorms causes sporadic E but none of these theories has proven out.

During a sporadic E opening, the FM dial can be filled up stations and for hours at a time, allowing you to ID many different stations. People in the center of the United States can hear stations from the east and the west coast and also Canada and Mexico during a summer. People living in the Southeastern US can hear into Central America and the Caribbean.