News

DA-Group has signed a contract with EISCAT for the delivery of the First Stage Receiver Unit for EISCAT 3D radar (E3D).

EISCAT has member institutes in several countries and it operates radar antenna sites in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Established in 1975, EISCAT’s mission is to provide scientists with access to incoherent scatter radar facilities of the highest technical standard. Today, EISCAT operates three of the world-class radars of the ten incoherent scatter radars in the world.

EISCAT Scientific Association is a non-profit scientific organization operating four radar antenna sites to enable research on the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere. Located above the Arctic Circle, the radars have been used for different types of studies and different phenomenas, e.g. Space Weather, Space Debris and the Aurora.

Contract Scope

The First Stage Receiver Unit (FSRU) procurement of the EISCAT 3D radar covers the low noise amplifier, analogue-to-digital converter and the first stage beam former system receiver chain for each of the E3D antennas at the three sites. Since each E3D antenna receive in two polarizations, the total number of receive channels is 19.838 for a fully deployed site. Due to potential funding constraints, a part of system build-up will be handled as options that may be ordered later, but before the final regular deliveries are done.

The EISCAT 3D system will be built as sub-arrays with 91 antennas in each block. The system should integrate the resulting 182 receive channels (for each 91-antenna sub-array) in a common FSRU unit.

EISCAT 3D, the new Arctic radar for space weather research

EISCAT 3D will be the world’s leading facility of its kind, offering a critically important window to the upper atmosphere and the near-Earth space in the European Arctic. The system will be built by EISCAT, primarily comprising research councils and national institutes from Finland, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan and China, with additional members from several other countries. EISCAT 3D is the culmination of a 10-year design and preparation phase, supported by the European Union. The EISCAT 3D project started in September 2017 with site preparations to begin in mid 2018. The radar is expected to be operational in 2021.

The selected design is a sophisticated phased-array radar bringing together new capabilities never before combined in a single instrument. As the name suggests, a key capability is to measure a 3-D volume of the upper atmosphere, in unprecedented detail. The obtained information is necessary to understand how energetic particles and electrical currents from space affect both the upper and the lower atmosphere (e.g. space weather and auroral phenomena) as well as man-made technologies, such as satellites and power grids on the ground.

Read more on EISCAT web pages.

More information:

Sami Kotiniemi
CEO
+358 29 0800 922