TGO Ramfjordmoen Ionosonde Data February 1987

About this dataset: This dataset contains ionograms in PNG format and covers data from February 01-28, 1987.About the Tromsø Ionosonde (1984-1992): During the period 1984-1992 the Ionosonde was situated at 69° 35' N, 19° 13' E at Ramfjordmoen near Tromsø, Norway and operated by the Auroral Observatory of the University of Tromsø. The instrument operated at this location prior to 1984, and still operates there (as of 2018); see the related publication for details. The instrument was fully digitized and based on a Hewlett Packard 21MX computer. The combination of a low power transmitter and complementary code transmission made the Tromsø ionosonde equivalent to a conventional ionosonde (at the time) with 20 µs pulses and 16 kW peak power. Routine operation was one ionogram every 20 min with a frequency sweep from 1 MHz to 12 MHz lasting between 2 and 3 min. For the 100 km altitude region the precision of determining the height of a sporadic E layer is ± 3 km. The ionograms were stored on magnetic tape. A noise discrimination routine in the computer program reduced the stored data to less than 10% of the raw data. In this way one 2400' tape held about 1300 ionograms, equivalent to 18 days' data. The tapes were 4-11 years old when they were read, resulting in around 20% data-loss during the process of transferring to other media. Today, storage is on online disk and with offline an archive on a variety of media.