SDR-based radar system for meteor detection

The idea of monitoring atmospheric events using radio waves has been implemented in the past. The concept has also been employed to detect meteors, that is, ionized trails created by meteors. The approach exploits the property of ionized trails to reflect radio waves and the use of bistatic radar and forward scattering. In this paper we present a setup of a data acquisition (DAQ) system based on software defined radio. We provide results of processed signals obtained by our system. In a similar way, the concept may be extended to detect ultra high energy cosmic rays. We discuss the challenges in upgrading the system for meeting the latter objective.