We’ve now said goodbye to two of our team members (thanks Scott and Jacob!) and unfortunately been greeted by a few days of cloudy weather. While this is a serious challenge for our visual diagnostics, it poses no problem for our radio systems, so we turned our attention to radio measurements until the weather passed through.
One of the major challenges of auroral or ionospheric radio measurements is that they are low frequency, and thus can be easily contaminated by the 60 Hz radio emission of power lines. Yes, even your power lines are emitting radio waves! Any wire in which electric charge is oscillating, radio waves are being generated. So in order to try and reduce this background noise, it was decided we needed to access some more remote terrain. What better way to do that in snow-covered Alaska than cross country skis? So after a brief visit to the rental house the team was fully equipped and on its way.
Since several of our team members were new to cross country skiing, we decided to start small and go on a short 1/2 mile out-and-back just behind our home base. We stopped at several intervals to test the 60 Hz noise levels:
One of the challenges posed by deploying a radio in a snow covered forest is finding a good way to ground the system. An attempt was made with a crescent wrench and a shovel:
Despite the poor weather we decided to deploy All Sky in the backyard anyway, and we were surprised to find that we did in fact get a little glimpse of the aurora when the clouds briefly broke during the night! We also got a good bit of snow:
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