EISCAT Measurement Campaign 2007
Diary

Last update: 2019-7-05, 07:28:17 UTC.

2007-10-17: In the morning Heating plus UHF (moare) and VHF (moare). On Svalbard ESR running manda.

Evening: extremely quiet, Kp was zero all day, all magnetometers show nothing by a straight line. The VHF is running tau8 at low elevation north for Cluster support. The Finnish UHF experiment is running beata, but there's no signal due to complete absence of an ionosphere..

2007-10-16: In the morning Heating plus UHF (moare) and VHF (moare). On Svalbard ESR running manda.

Evening: No UHF run due to Japanese priority.

2007-10-15: In the morning Heating plus UHF (moare) and VHF (moare). On Svalbard ESR running manda, but only as a background measurement, because the local power station does not have enough capacity today to run SPEAR.

UHF: very quiet night. We ran the new plasma line experiment of Ingemar's beata (between arc and tau") from 1800 to 0200 UTC. On the VHF tau8 looking north. Last ESR night run (taro).

2007-10-14: In the morning four hours or Heating, UHF, and VHF. Moare on the VHF and UHF. Evening free thanks to our Japanese collegues, who have the first priority on the UHF radar. No VHF scheduled this night.

2007-10-13: In the morning four hours or Heating, UHF, and VHF. We ran arc-dlayer-ht on the UHF for the first bit and moare on the VHF, then switching to moare also on the UHF.

Evening: No UHF due, because our Japanese colleagues had the priority. The VHF ran as planned (tau8) and we had a rather active night. The ESR was pointing south at the same time.

2007-10-12: In the morning no experiments at all, because the CP runs at ESR and UHF have priority and do not allow Heating.

UHF: In the evening ran as planned, but starting one hour late due to the CP experiment, which ended at 1900 UTC. We ran arc1 until 2200 UTC, then we switched to moare for the rest if the night (until 0200 UTC) after discussing with Kari.

2007-10-11: In the morning (0930-1200 UTC) we ran the VHF and Heating experiments for Antti. The MST is off now, and we agreed with Cesar, that it stays off whenever the VHF is needed. On the VHF, the MOARE experiment was run all the time. The Heater modulation was 6s O, 6s off, 6s X, 6s off for 14 min, and then 6 min off to cool the Heating Tx. Then starting over.

UHF: The UHF will run a CP experiment (tau2pl) starting at 1300 UTC and continuing until tomorrow, 1900 UTC. Therefore we will not be able to run our UHF run tonight. Note that tomorrow we will start our UHF run 1 hour later than scheduled, i.e. immediately after the CP ends (1900 UTC).

VHF: Tonight we ran the VHF as planned, tau8 low elevation (30°) even though the ESR will not be able to run "Polewards", because of a CP priority.

2007-10-10: The VHF and Heating experiment in the morning had to be cancelled due to the MST radar interfering. We could not reach any of the MST people and ask them to turn the radar off, so we decided to skip today's run.

Evening, UHF: We decided to run testing Markku's experiments, so the UHF ran from 1800 to 0200 UTC, experiment MOARE.

Evening, VHF: There was a cluster run from 1830 to 2230 UTC running tau1. Even though this was not scheduled before, we requested the VHF to run from 2230 to 0200 UTC for Markku's group; experiment MOARE.

2007-10-09: First campaign evening, some startup problems with the VHF, where we see terrible interference on one channel. Markku sees spikes in the raw signal of 10 us duration every 1 ms. Curiously the new MST radar outsite the heating building runs a test experiment at 1 per cent duty cycle. Also, the new radar runs at 56 MHz, and 4 x 56 MHz is 224 MHz. The interferences stopped at 18:57 UTC, and we confirm that it is really the MORO radar interfering with the VHF. Later in the night the MST ran at full duty cycle making VHF experiments impossible. Thus we stopped the tau8 run half an hour early, at 0130 UTC.

VHF running tau8 since 16:00 UTC with some gaps due to testing directed towards finding the source of the interference. UHF is not running, since our Japanese colleagues have the higher priority. ESR is running tara pointing magnetic south (150°) at 30° elevation.

UHF: We did not run the UHF, because our Japanese colleagues had the higher priority and decided to run.