SANAE SuperDARN Radar | research, radar station, antenna

 research, radar station, antenna

The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is an international radar network designed to observe velocities and irregularities of electrical fields in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. It supplies valuable data to track space weather. The radar at the SANAE base was one of the first to be deployed in the southern hemisphere, along with the British radar at Halley and the Japanese radar at Syowa. Together those three stations cooperated in a research project called SHARE (The Southern Hemisphere Auroral Radar Experiment), operated jointly by the University of Natal, Potchefstroom University, the British Antarctic Survey and Johns Hopkins University. SHARE eventually became part of SuperDARN and the former acronym is now rarely used.

Using a main array of 16 antennas, each mounted on a 12 m tower and radiating on fixed frequencies in the 8 MHz - 20 MHz range, the radar transmits an RF pulse into the upper atmosphere every two minutes. The SuperDARN stations' ranges overlap to cover a large portion of the polar and high latitudes, and an increasing portion of the middle latitudes as new stations are built.