Live: Perseids Meteor Shower with RTL-SDR

The annual Perseids meteor shower is peaking right now (this Wednesday and Thursday), and with the right equipment (and location) you can detect these meteors with an RTL-SDR dongle and appropriate antenna. When a meteor enters the atmosphere it leaves behind a brief trail of ionized air which is highly reflective to RF signals. These trails can reflect carrier waves from distant transmitters towards your antenna, allowing you to detect a meteor entering the atmosphere. This is called meteor scatter.

If you live in Europe, you can use the powerful Graves radar at 143.050 MHz as the transmitter. In other locations and the USA you can also use analogue TV broadcasts like in this post where the observer uses a TV tower in Canada. For Graves all you’ll need is a dipole antenna and perhaps LNA, but for TV transmissions you may need a directional Yagi antenna. More information can be found in our previous posts about meteor scatter and is this document.

But for now if you just want to observe others then currently there is this temporary live stream (now offline) shown below from Poland on YouTube and this always running live stream from the USA.

Equpment used by Reddit user Maxworm to detect Perseids meteors using the Graves radar: Dipole, LNA, Bias-Tee RTL-SDR.
Equipment used by Reddit user Maxworm to detect Perseids meteors using the Graves radar: Dipole, LNA, Bias-Tee and RTL-SDR.
Meteor detected by MaxWorm.
Meteor detected by MaxWorm

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