George: "Meteor scatter is a way of making contacts on 2 metres by reflection from meteorites--'shooting stars' as they are called colloquially--which we see on clear nights during the summer. Of course they are not falling stars at all--they are meteorites which burn up when they hit the earth's atmosphere, leaving the trail that we see. We take advantage of this phenomenon for bouncing our signals off the trail but unfortunately it is a very short-lived event. Once when there were a lot of meteorites I was able to maintain contact with LX1SI of Luxembourg for a whole three minutes on SSB. It was during the period of the Persides which usually occur for a week in August when the earth's orbit takes it through this cloud of space debris. Millions of meteorites can be as small as a grain of sand and of course leave no visible trail when they strike the earth's atmosphere. The earth goes through other major clusters in April and in December. The phenomenon can also affect signals on lower frequencies. One can be in QSO on 20 metres via ground wave with a station a couple of hundred miles away with signals around s2 to s3. Suddenly one or two words are heard at s9 which indicates a momentary reflection off a meteorite trail." George also explained that in order to defeat the brevity of the time when communication was possible it was customary to record a message on a tape recorder and transmit it at high speed. The other station would also record at high speed and then play back at normal speed to hear the message normally. I asked SV1AB to tell me about Sporadic E propagation. "In this form of contact the signals are reflected from an ionised area 90 to 120 kilometres above the surface of the earth. I have been having contacts by this method for about 18 years now even before the advent of SSB on two metres. I have had contacts with England and with Moscow to the north-east of Athens. The phenomenon occurs for three or four months during the summer, and never during the winter. The ionisation moves very rapidly sometimes--you may be talking to a station in Malta and he suddenly disappears and a station in Yugoslavia comes up on the same frequency." "Every summer" George continued, "we get Troposcatter which allows communication on all frequencies from VHF to 10 GHz even. This type of propagation occurs during certain special meteorological conditions, like high barometric pressure and extreme heat. We sometimes hear stations in Malta and Sicily with very loud signals."