A new incoherent scatter technique in the EISCAT Svalbard Radar

Abstract

A special incoherent scatter technique in the European Incoherent Scatter (EISCAT) Svalbard Radar (ESR) was tested in November 1999. After the 70-MHz IF stage the standard ESR receiver was replaced by a spectrum analyzer acting as a combination of a down-converter, an AD converter, and a quadrature detector and giving complex digital samples at a rate of 4 MHz. The samples were fed into a PCI-bus-based programmable digital I/O card, which performed a four-sample summing operation to give an effective sampling rate of 1 MHz, large enough to span all the frequency channels used in the experiment. Finally, the resulting samples were stored on hard disk. Hence the total multichannel signal was stored instead of separate lagged products for each frequency channel, which is the procedure in the standard hardware. This solution has some benefits; for example, the ground clutter can be eliminated with only a small loss in statistical accuracy, and the true phase of the transmitter waveform in phase-coded experiments can be measured better than in the present ESR system. In this paper the technical arrangements of this setup are presented. A new incoherent scatter experiment is also described, and the first results obtained using the hardware are shown.