On the Determination of Velocities of Radar Meteors

The results of testing the classical method of velocity determination based on the positions of the extrema of Fresnel diffraction patterns (FDP) in radio echo amplitude, is presented. This technique is compared to the method of nonlinear least squares fitting (NLSF) of the theoretical patterns to the observed those. It is shown that while the classical method can fail in yielding correct values for the velocity of radar meteors, the NLSF method always yields good results.