A communications technique which uses the ionized tails of meteors as a bounce-point for a high speed signal burst, in the same way that the ionosphere is used to reflect normal radio transmissions around the earth. Computer controlled equipment is used to locate the presence of a meteor and to broadcast a signal during the short time it takes for the meteor to travel across the sky.
The technique, suggested in the late 1920s, was at that time impractical. The time taken for a meteor to travel across the sky is so short that the burst of information would have to be extremely compressed if anything of any practical use was to be sent. Now, of course, high-speed data compression techniques are in common use, and there are usually enough micrometeor trails in the sky to permit the continuous transmission of a message.
The maximum length of a single link is about 1600 kilometers, this distance depending on the height of the meteor trail and the curvature of the earth. A typical meteor trail lasts for only a few hundred milliseconds, and pauses between suitable trails can range from a few seconds to a few minutes. This is why the data transfer consists of bursts of high data rate transmission. This burst transmission characteristic does offer a useful advantage, in that many links can share a single transmission frequency.
Meteor burst communications offers a transmission method that is difficult to jam, will not be disturbed by sunstorms and would remain unaffected in the event of a nuclear war. The technique does sound impractical - just how many meteors are there in the sky at any one time? And yet a quick internet search shows that many companies are willing to put considerable time and effort into this method of communication; an indication, perhaps, that such scepticism is unwarranted. Meteor burst transmission doesn't require a Sean Connery-esque meteor the size of a city to bounce off; even the ionised trail produced by a microscopic piece of space debris entering the atmosphere is quite enough to reflect a short burst of data. | 
