Wallops Island Transmitter Overhaul - March 2015
By: ksterne on: Fri., Apr. 10, 2015 09:12 AM EDT (9191 Reads)
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Early in March 2015, Kevin Sterne and Mike Ruohoniemi of Virginia Tech and Drew Knuth and Ethan Miller of John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab met at the Wallops Island SuperDARN site to assess the electronics and the condition of the site. This trip would serve to prepare for a larger trip during the summer where more effort will be put into enabling elevation angle data to be collected by the radar. As well, this trip would take care of a few outstanding issues including a check of the transmitters and radar control electronics.
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Walking around the grounds of the site some areas have been taken care of with grass growing right up to the towers making them easily accessible. Other areas around the site have grown in with a thick brush that makes accessing the towers, especially around the interferometer array, very difficult.
As mentioned before, the electronics were inspected to make sure that the radar was working as well as possible. During this inspection a number of transmitters were found to be working well on transmit, but not passing the received signal through the radar control electronics. Several repairs were done on site to correct this problem.
Lastly, during this trip two instruments not completely related to SuperDARN were disassembled and brought back to the Virginia Tech lab. These were originally installed by colleagues at Stanford University but have been needing to be removed from the Wallops site. The first of these is a photometric instrument known as PIPER and will be returned to Stanford University. The other instrument is known as an AWESOME VLF receiver and will be used by the SuperDARN group at Virginia Tech to listen for VLF waves.
