Narrowband digital voice communications over a meteor burst channel

We report the first successful narrowband digital transmissions of voice messages via meteor trail scatter propagation. A 12-word message, which took 6s to recite, was represented by a compressed data stream of 43 characters and required 86 ms for transmittal over the meteor scatter channel. The experiment used state-of-the-art speech recognition/digitisation equipment, a digital meteor burst communication system and a speech synthesiser.