Day Ten

At 06:40 local time there was little rain. Instead it was quite misty. However it was far too early to be up and so I went back to bed. Next time I got up, it was definitely raining. A stroll over to the EISCAT main building told me that they were busily working on getting the radars fixed and the problems of yesterday were not as serious as they might have first been thought.

There were breaks in the clouds that came and went. Andrew and I went to the local shop for local people and were scowled at by the local lady, we think she was trying to be nice. In the afternoon we took Todd to the ARIES site and in the pouring rain and at much personal cost attempted to fix some of the ARIES antennae. Andrew managed to 'fix' two of the guy wires on two of the worst leaning antennae; I held the ladd antenna straight. We were thoroughly disheartened at the job that lay ahead and considered that our 'repairs' were not likely to last. Mike Rietveld and Brett Isham were at the site with their Russian colleagues performing SEE experiments. They took some photos of us and had a good laugh. Unfortunately it seems that Mike no longer works for Max Planck and so I could not blackmail him into fixing the antennae for us. We gave up and ran from the rain. Todd did suggest that it could have been snow damage; Mike confirmed that the snow had reached to about that level in the spring and so perhaps the damage was a consequence of cycling thawing and freezing?

Weather conditions are not good. Some blue sky has been spotted but is very much in the vein of the Scarlet Pimpernel: elusive. Consequently DROP has been cancelled (unless a miracle happens within the next few minutes).

Tomorrow final decisions have to be made for the weekend and Monday. At the moment, I am of the opinion that I will cancel DLETE on Sunday and will run on Saturday and Monday. PAMS will run on all three days. Of course this is conditional on the radars being operational. A possible problem arises on Sunday; the Japanese have priority on the UHF and of course that prevents me from running with the UHF if the VHF is broken, so fingers crossed. In addition they emailed Mike Rietveld and asked for no heating during the period of their run, Mike forwarded this to Andrew and I, but since they are first priority it is doubtful we would have run anyway.


Currently testing of the UHF and VHF are ongoing but we have had some impressive crowbars. Things have been stable for a while now, but we have very little power on the UHF (800-900 kW) and 1400 kW on the VHF. The Finns will be in soon to do their run. Currently they are happy to use their time even though the optical conditions are poor.

Todd is giving a seminar at the University tomorrow morning and Andrew and I will head over with him for 10 am. Hopefully tomorrow evening will provide for some observations. Saturday is still looking to be our best bet since the weather forecast is more favourable. Once again, fingers crossed.