Out to do some fieldwork!

Greetings, just checking in after Derek, Alessandra and I have been out to Kvaløya to set up the HF-antenna that we have been working on this summer and two of the LBA-antennas used at the KAIRA facility. Our goal for the day was to get some measurements off some of the heating that Juha is conducting at EISCAT and also see how well the HF-antenna performs compared to the LBA; the low-life student antenna vs  famous radio-astronomer antenna, tensions will be high indeed.

The HF-system is a dual-polarization receive antenna, consisting mainly of parts bought at the local hardware shop as well as 2x active-antenna amplifier kits bought from http://active-antenna.eu/. The goal throughout this summer has been to construct a cheap and mobile HF-receive array. The build-process will unfold itself as this blog moves forward, and hopefully we will eventually have a recipe for our readers on how to construct the same and/or similar system once the build is complete.

Signing off with pictures from the day's excursion:

Derek & Alessandra assembling the antenna while exchanging
puns about Monty Python and The Lord of the Rings.

Our base of operations for the day; the level 8 Batmobile.