A solo trip was made by Kevin Sterne to the Fort Hays radar site between April 29th and May 3rd, 2013. During this trip, a number of long outstanding issues would be taken care of as well as a pressing matter of boxing up and shipping out all of the leftover pole hardware. This pole hardware included all of the nuts, bolts, and washers necessary for putting the poles together. Other outstanding issues were a complete recalibration and reprogramming of the phasing cards for both radars as well as some other software upgrades.

With the new RBSP mode camgpaign officially 3 months into operations on the SuperDARN radar, a look was taken as to how much time this mode was being run on a few radars. Data was collected using the new CPID Inventory and recording the number of soundings made on a radar for each month. Here the number of soundings doesn't exactly take into account the amount of time the mode was run, but it is a close approximation. The results for this analysis for Blackstone can be seen in the picture to the left.

Despite heavy snows the night before in the Blacksburg area, a day trip was made out to the Blackstone site in order to finally meet up with NSF frequency managers Andy Clegg and Tom Gergely. This trip would also include recalibrating the amplitudes of the signals being created in the phase generator in the radar control electronics.

Kevin Sterne and Ray Greenwald made a trip to the Blackstone radar on Nov. 29, 2012 in order to investigate the range differences between a normalscan based and a tauscan based control program as well as to install recently acquired custom filters and modify the receiver front end. The range differences had been noticed when running the new rbspscan in support of the Van Allen Probes (formerly Radiation Belt Storm Probes). The new filters and redesign of the receiver front end would allow for cleaner mixing and filtering of the received RF signal.

Ray Greenwald and Ethan Miller of John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab made a maintenance trip to the Wallops Island radar after a brief observation of the site after Hurricane Sandy. It was reported that several wires were down and not many transmitters were working after the hurricane passed through the mid-Atlantic region. Ray and Ethan's trip was to make repairs in order to bring the radar up to full operation.

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.

During a phone call with Kent White, local operator for the Goose Bay radar, it was determined the problem with the Goose Bay site that has resulted in bad/non-existent data for the past few weeks. Kent track the problem down to a bad power outlet that seemed to be causing power bars to fail one after another. Using a new power bar plugged into a different power outlet, the radar has been running for several hours and has been collecting sensible data. Many thanks go to Kent for solving this problem without requiring a trip from someone at the SuperDARN lab at Virginia Tech.

The return of normal operations at the site paves the way for this radar to begin to participate in the RBSP operations that other Virginia Tech SuperDARN radars have already started.

A day trip was made by Kevin Sterne and Fort Hays State University student intern, Randy Oullette, to the Blackstone radar in order to investigate the network connection outage and restore the connection. Also on this trip, a different style of electronics would be introduced to Randy as he had only worked with the MSI style of radar control electronics.

Tuesday, Sep 11: Bill reports that Adak is on the air! In his words: 'I am pleased to announce that we had "first light" on both halves of the Adak system this afternoon. We brought up Adak West at about 0200 UT today and are receiving great data. I want to thank all of the MSI partners for their contributions to making this build a success. All went smoothly and we had a great time…no seriously despite horizontal rain for a good part of the time we had fun.'

Congratulations to Bill and the entire MSI build team!

View 'First Light' and Adak Island Photos Here!!!

Aug. 22nd Update:

The final hours at the site were spent going over a few leftover items on the 'To-Do' list. What could be done during this trip was finished off and some discussion with Randy Ou on things to look out for in the coming months. Before leaving the site, some quick measurements were made on the interferometer phasing cards. Here it seems as though some more work will need to be done in order to get the interferometer arrays at Fort Hays fully operational. However, upon leaving the site, all 32 transmitters were firing at full power.

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