When it's raining meteors, it's time to get inside, ping some rocks and visit a Web site that is singing the praises of pinging.

Wednesday night, I took Mr. Pie out for last call. While Pie was looking for a suitable tree, I looked up at the crystal clear sky and saw a pinhead of light slowly and silently cross the constellations. "Must be a Sputnik," I thought.

As my friend disappeared over the northern horizon, a shooting star intersected the evaporated path of the satellite. I recalled that this being early August, the Perseids meteor shower should be descending on us. I checked the Internet and sure enough, the meteor shower sages were predicting that Perseids would peak on Tuesday morning (August 13).

W8WN's High Speed Meteor Scatter and JT44 EME Web site has loads of information that will help you make contacts via meteors during this week's (and future) meteor showers.

"Good timing," I thought and after further thought, I decided that it was a good time to visit a Web site that would be apropos to this astronomical event. Shelby Ennis, W8WN, runs the High Speed Meteor Scatter and JT44 EME Web page and it seemed to fit the bill.

As the name of the Web page implies, W8WN is a proponent of high-speed meteor scatter (HSMS) because it is much more efficient than slow CW or SSB meteor scatter (MS). In general, you have a greater than 90 percent chance of completing an HSMS sked compared to a 5 percent chance of completing an MS sked on SSB. In addition, HSMS is usable every day of the year because it needs only the fractional-second underdense pings of sporadic meteors. These are available just about all the time, not just during the peaks of major meteor showers.

The Web page has links to a variety of programs for working meteor scatter including 9A4GL's MSDSP and W1JT's WSJT, as well as a bevy of "accessory" programs that can support your MS work.

Make sure to check out the Hot News page, which contains the latest information about what is happening, eg, the page currently has Perseids and Leonids information. Depending on what's happening (if anything), Shelby updates the page anywhere from every week to as often as several times per day. Newcomers should also refer to the Hot News page to check out some of the papers and references links there that can help novice ping jockeys.

By the way, the page also has lots of information concerning EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) operations; so if you are a moonbounce aficionado, don't miss it!

Until next time, keep on surfin'

Editor's note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and is a member of the QQCC (QST quarter century club), i.e., he has been a QST writer for 25 years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager), but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio. As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater and weather station from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan has been a long time advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio and wrote programs to dupe contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he uses his Mac to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio web page. To contact Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.

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