Congratulations to Dr. Mike Ruohoniemi for promotion to full Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering! He and Dr. Jo Baker have built a team of researchers and graduate students in the SuperDARN HF radar lab within Space @ VT. Dr. Ruohoniemi's promotion is official with approval by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors meeting on June 4th, 2018. More information can be found at the official VT News announcement.

Space @ Virginia Tech has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) organization for 2018! This program allows undergraduate and graduate students to propose to work on open source projects that benefit the open source community and the community related to the organization. Project ideas and more information about how to apply to Space@VT's program can be found on the info page on the Space@VT site.

Interested students should begin working on the Google form to send us some introductory info as well as a simple coding task. From there, proposals can start to be submitted to the GSoC website beginning on March 12, 2018 and ending on March 27, 2018. For more information, please e-mail the Space@VT GSoC e-mail: .

Space@VT is excited to be working with the GSoC program for it's first year and very honored to be selected amongst only a few other higher education organizations!

A new version of the radar software toolkit (RST) has been released by the Data Analysis Working Group and can be found on the working group's github repository as version 4.1. Some major changes come with this new version including the deprecation of the '-new' flag in favor of using '-old' for data formats prior to 20060701 (*.dat, *.fit, etc.). The '-new' flag will no longer work and may break processing if used, so please update any external processing code.

In addition, RST 4.1 comes with major revisions to the gridding and mapping software. This means RST 4.1 will no longer produce the grdex and mapex files that are found on the VT-SuperDARN website. New files produced with the RST 4.1 code will be called grid2 and map2. These new files retain much of the same format as grdex and mapex files but are being separated to distinguish between the major revisions in the gridding and mapping software. RST 4.1 does maintain backwards compatibility so grdex and mapex files should be read and plotted with the current code.

Lastly, RST 4.1 introduces fitacf 3.0 as an experimental option of processing rawacf files into fitacf files. The default for this processing remains with fitacf 2.5, but users have the option to process what we at Virginia Tech are calling fitacf3 files with the command 'make_fit -fitacf-version 3.0'.

For now, grdex and mapex files will be produced to the end of 2017. Grid2 and map2 files will be produced starting with the beginning of 2017, but could be extended further back in time as necessary. Also, starting with the beginning of Dec. 2017, fitacf3 files will be produced in addition to fitacf (v2.5) files. Some of the web tools found on this website have been updated to plot this data. For the latest on what is available in the VT database, please refer to the data inventory page.

The Fall 2012 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union is being held in San Francisco, December 3-7. The meeting web site is at http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/

The VT SuperDARN group is being represented by professors Mike Ruohoniemi and Jo Baker and graduate students Nathaniel Frissell and Evan Thomas

A schedule of all presentations/posters with VT SuperDARN authorship can be found here.

SA41A-2052: Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances Observed by Midlatitude SuperDARN Radars
Nathaniel A Frissell, Joseph B Baker, John M Ruohoniemi, Mary L West, William A Bristow

SM11A-2286. Observations of Mid-Latitude Ionospheric Density Structures Over North America
Evan G. Thomas, Joseph B. Baker, J. M. Ruohoniemi, Anthea J. Coster

An updated version of "Steering SuperDARN Radars" has been uploaded to VT SuperDARN/Tutorials. This version contains additional information on the University of Saskatchewan DDS-based phasing matrix.

Update 6/16/2012: I've since left the USS Manufacturing shop in Renfrew, Ontario and toured some through Canada. Upon leaving the shop at USS, there were a few remaining issues, only a small one of which for the upcoming build at Adak Island. One thing that was communicated very well to the guys at USS Manufacturing, was our problem with the 1/2" shackles at the base of the 56' poles as seen in the picture to the right. These poles were quickly brought inside and a air-powered dremel tool was used to easier make the hole bigger such that the 1/2" shackle would fit into the hole. Upon leaving the shop in Renfrew, it was determined that the set of poles and hardware for Renfrew could go out early next week, probably on Tuesday and take about 5 days to get to Seattle.