Specular meteor radars (SMRs) are ground-based instruments used to learn about the upper atmosphere, around 70-120 km in altitude. These systems take advantage of the trails left behind by meteors burning up in the atmosphere, reflecting signals off the plasma to measure the wind at the trail’s location. Traditional methods of determining the trail position require a large amount of precisely placed infrastructure to be carefully calibrated, and even then, the uncertainties in the trail’s position are difficult to estimate. The lack of reported uncertainties can make rigorous analysis of the reported winds difficult.

This work examines a new method to determine the trail positions, which aims to reduce the amount of infrastructure required, eliminate calibration, provide more precise estimates of position, and more easily estimated uncertainties for each observation. A short campaign is carried out in which meteor trail positions are estimated using both techniques for experimental validation and direct comparison.