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Akira FUKUDA Kaiji MUKUMOTO Yasuaki YOSHIHIRO Kei NAKANO Satoshi OHICHI Masashi NAGASAWA Hisao YAMAGISHI Natsuo SATO Akira KADOKURA Huigen YANG Mingwu YAO Sen ZHANG Guojing HE Lijun JIN
In December 2001, the authors started two kinds of experiments on the meteor burst communication (MBC) in Antarctica to study the ability of MBC as a communication medium for data collection systems in that region. In the first experiment, a continuous tone signal is transmitted from Zhongshan Station. The signal received at Syowa Station (about 1,400 km apart) is recorded and analyzed. This experiment is aimed to study basic properties of the meteor burst channel in that high latitude region. On the other hand, the second experiment is designed to estimate data throughput of a commercial MBC system in that region. A remote station at Zhongshan Station tries to transfer data packets each consisting of 10 data words to the master station at Syowa Station. Data packets are generated with five minutes interval. In this paper, we explain the experiments, briefly examine the results of the first year (from April 2002 to March 2003), and put forward the plan for the experiments in the second and third year. From the data available thus far, we can see that 1) the sinusoidal daily variation in the meteor activity typical in middle and low latitude regions can not be clearly seen, 2) non-meteoric propagations frequently dominate the channel especially during night hours, 3) about 60% of the generated data packets are successfully transferred to the master station within two hours delay even though we are now operating the data transfer system only for five minutes in each ten minutes interval, etc.