Kototabang — West Sumatera meteor radar: System design and initial results of a large scale meteor echo

The western-equatorial meteor radar was installed at Kototabang on equatorial (0.20° LS 100,32°BT) and has been operational since 2002. It is used for observing meteor as they enter the Earth´s atmosphere to provide the wind data profile in both zonal and meridional direction besides meteor echo rate data which have only one wide beam signal transmission vertically. MWR system hardware comprises two main components: The antenna system and feeders, and the radar system itself. The antenna system is typically composed of two-element Yagis for transmission and five 2-element Yagis for reception. The instrument cabinet contains all of the remaining elements of the MWR radar system i.e. the RF components and the data acquisition which equipped with a GPS-locked real time clock for accurate acquisition time stamps. Those mentioned above will be described in this paper about the radar system, along with the details of the experiment and analysis techniques. Also an initial results are presented, indicating the radar produces count rates around thousands meteors per day.