Using the EISCAT heating facility as a radar

Polar mesospheric summer echoes (turbulent weakly ionized plasma with ice particles in the mesosphere)

The EISCAT facility has recently installed a new digital beamformer for one of the receiver arrays. This allows digital beamforming of the signals from the antennas on receive, which can be used as a radar receiver on HF between 2-10 MHz. Since last Monday, the first campaign to test this new capability is underway in collaboration between Norway, UK, Finland, and EISCAT. Last week we ran tests with low power pulsed radar mode. The above plot shows echoes from polar mesospheric summer echoes using 5.4 MHz.