DEWLine Museum – The Distant Early Warning Radar Line

I think the most impressive part about these sites was the way they networked them together with UHF/Microwave Troposcatter links, which basically just scream RF into the sky and then listen for the small amount of energy that's reflected off the troposphere on the other end. (It's a little more complex than that)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_scatter

This method was the back-bone of long distance Cold War communications links (As well as HF using ionospheric propagation) until Satellites started becoming more commonplace in the 70's

meteor scatter communications were even more crazy and impressive (still in use actually)

Had not heard of this, that's impressive.

Yup. SNOtel uses meteor bounce. They've talked about trying to switch to satellite or cellular, but it just doesn't make sense for their use case

That sounds like stuff of science fiction, can't believe it works. The best part is that it works long distance without having to have satellites in the sky... and is probably un-jammable?

Thanks for sharing this, so cool to learn about it!

BNSF railroad also has an extensive meteor scatter radio system across north america that is similar to SNOtel.