2011 SuperDARN Workshop
ABSTRACTS
Investigations of cross-channel interference on a stereo SuperDARN radar
A. McDonald (1) and J. Devlin (2)
(1) Department of Physics, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
(2) Department of Electronic Engineering, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
abstract. Interference between channels while operating in two channel 'stereo' mode is investigated for the TIGER Unwin SuperDARN radar. A discretionary mode was run in which channel A cycles sequentially over a number of pre-set frequencies while channel B remains fixed. It was found that for certain values of the channel A and channel B frequencies and for certain beams, the number of echoes received on the fixed frequency channel B depends strongly on the frequency on channel A at the time. For a stereo radar to be operating properly there should be no such correlation effects between channels. This cross-channel interference is observed not to depend on ionospheric conditions, only on the particular frequencies used. Spurious channel B echoes resulting from cross-channel interference exhibit low velocities, an absence of low spectral widths and occur at intermediate ranges. Results of a number of tests will be presented which provide insight into this issue currently under investigation.