About the 430 MHz Radar System

Instructions for setting up and running a dual beam experiment

Introduction

The Arecibo 430 MHz radar uses incoherent scatter to determine the characteristics of the ionosphere. It is part of a chain of incoherent scatter radars operated by the Upper Atmospheric Facilities program of the National Science Foundation with strong links to the CEDAR program and the National Space Weather program. The radar chain frequently operates in a campaign mode involving the EISCAT radars in addition to the US radars as well as many other facilities and instruments; see our Arecibo World Day Home Page.

The Arecibo radar is extremely powerful and sensitive; it is capable of making very accurate measurements of many ionospheric parameters. For example, see our helium layer measurements and our simultaneous measurements of two different ion temperatures.

Staff members at the Arecibo observatory conduct various ionospheric studies using the other radars in the chain as well as Arecibo; for example, the effect of electron Coulomb collisions on the incoherent scatter spectrum at Jicamarca.

Specifications:

Data Analysis

We describe the the analysis of our World Day data. in this linked document.

For several years we have been working on a better method of converting the line of sight velocities from the world Day data into vector velocities. The method we have adopted is Linear Regularization; it is described in Chapter 18 of Numerical Recipes. Here is a draft of a write-up of our application of the linear regularization technique .