DC-VT Crew completes packing of antenna poles and hardware at the Blackstone site for shipment to Iceland
By: miker on: Wed., June 23, 2021 11:23 PM EDT (5125 Reads)
Following on a trip earlier this month to prepare the antenna poles meant for a dual radar build in Iceland for shipping, a Dartmouth College - Virginia Tech crew returned to the Blackstone radar site to actually load the poles and related hardware into two shipping containers. The trip took place June 14-16 under difficult conditions of high temperature and sometimes punishing humidity. The PI for the Iceland radar build, Simon Shepherd from Dartmouth College, directed the loading. From Virginia Tech four crew members returned for this trip (Mike Ruohoniemi, Kevin Sterne, Ian Kelley, Mark Higgins) and were joined by undergrad John Fiorini. The photo shows the crew triumphant after loading the second container with antenna base sections. On June 21 Kevin returned solo to the site to oversee pickup of the containers by a trucking company. The hardware is now on its way to Iceland to complete the 4th MSI SuperDARN radar build.
Photo credit: Ned Jones (Virginia Tech Southern Piedmont Agricultural Research and Extension Center)
In photo from left to right: Kevin, Mark, Simon, Ian, Mike, John
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The previous dual radar sites under the NSF Mid-Sized Infrastrucure (MSI) program were built at Fort Hays (Kansas, 2009), Christmas Valley (Oregon, 2010) and Adak (2012, Alaska)
For additional information see the article
"Review of the accomplishments of Mid-latitude Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) HF Radars" in the journal Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (PEPS) at
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40645-019-0270-5
This paper includes a 4-page supplementary file
titled
"Historical Overview of Mid-latitude SuperDARN" available at the link
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1186%2Fs40645-019-0270-5/MediaObjects/40645_2019_270_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
A news article describing the drafting of these papers via a pair of workshops hosted by Dr. Nozomu Nishitani (ISEE/ Nagoya University) can be found at:
http://vt.superdarn.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=317
