BRAMS: Belgian RAdio Meteor Stations

BRAMS Newsfeed

BRAMS annual meeting 2023 & Problem with the BRAMS transmitter

BRAMS annual meeting

As a reminder, we will have our BRAMS annual meeting on Saturday 15 April at MIRA in Grimbergen.
We will welcome participants from 09h20 and plan to start the presentations near 09h45-10h.

Preliminary program :

  • Hervé Lamy : status of the BRAMS network : recent developments
  • Antoine Calegaro : the new BRAMS website and functionalities
  • Joachim Balis : Meteoroid trajectory and speed reconstruction using BRAMS data
  • Stijn Calders : Recent updates about the Radio Meteor Zoo
  • Hervé Lamy : FRIPON-BE : status and perspectives
  • Hervé Lamy : quick presentation of the IMC 2023 organized at the Euro Space Center

More details coming soon. Please, if you haven't done so, let me know if you plan to attend

New problem with the BRAMS Tx

In the last few days, the transmitted power has fluctuated a lot. Since our last visit last month, we are now
able to monitor this power every minute but the cause of this problem is still unknown. So do not be surprised
if you do not see signals or weaker ones than usual at some moment. We will go to Dourbes tomorrow and
replace the material if needed. We will keep you up-to-date.

Kind regards,
Hervé & the BRAMS team

Presentations at the IMC 2022 in Porozslo, Hungary

H. Lamy and J. Balis have attended the International Meteor Conference (IMC) 2022 organized in Porozlo in Hungary.

Joachim presented part of his work on "Reconstructing meteoroid trajectories using forward scatter radio observations from the BRAMS network" while Hervé presented "Observability Function of the BRAMS network".


The papers submitted for the proceedings can be found "here" and "here".

MOMSTER in the press

The MOMSTER project has been presented in the EOS / iedereenwetenschapper website with an article "Vallende sterren in de klas"

New BRAMS station in Gavere and new location for the antenna at BEGENT

On 30 June, we have installed a new BRAMS station in Gavere. Also, we have moved the antenna to another location on the roof of the building at BEGENT in order to prevent electromagnetic noise most probably generated by their astronomical dome.

 

Radio Meteor Workshop

A small radio meteor workshop was organized online by Cis Verbeeck (ROB). The focus was mostly on determining the activity of a meteor shower and on how to subtract adequately the sporadic background. Topics covered Observability Function (OF), sporadic background estimate, and Activity Level (AL) index. List of participants: Cis Verbeeck, Hiroshi Ogawa, Christian Steyaert, Hervé Lamy, Stijn Calders, Antonio Martinez Picar. The following talks were given:

Talk "BRAMS, la symphonie des météores" given at URLab during the SmartMonday event on 10 May

This talk was given by H. Lamy in French and was recorded. SmartMonday 10 May 2021 Direct Youtube link of the recording

Fireball above Belgium last night

A very nice fireball passed over Belgium on 22 April at around 22H08 UT (a bit after midnight local time). The speed (~ 48 km/s) and direction are consistent with a Lyrid meteor. It was visually observed at altitudes between approximately 102 and 84 km. The speed was too large to expect any meteorite on the ground. It was captured by the new AllSky7 camera that we have recently installed in Humain. See the HD video below (Credit: AllSky7)

 

It was also detected by the FRIPON network which provided the trajectory. The fireball passed nearly at the vertical of our transmitter in Dourbes. Below the image from our FRIPON camera located in Brussels and the visible trajectory as reconstructed from FRIPON data.

 

It was also detected by all BRAMS stations creating a very strong overdense meteor echo saturating several receiving stations. Below are examples of data recorded at Humain, Genk and our recent new station at Halle de Han in Tintigny.

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