Blackstone

BLACKSTONE, VA (37.10 N, -77.95 E)
The SuperDARN radar at Blackstone saw first light in February 2008. It uses the new Twin-Terminated-Folded-Dipole antenna design. The Blackstone site has had two phases of operation defined by hardware: (i) until 11-JUL-2011 it ran on electronics provided by Leicester University and was capable of stereo operations(see Notes for additional details), (ii) since 01-OCT-2011 it has been running on electronics provided by Virginia Tech.
Software update for new VT hardware (since 17-Jan-2012): 
The ROS.1.25 was reinstalled on Jan. 17, 2012 with a newly developed site library that presented cleaner code than the modified site library that was developed for the Univ. of Leicester hardware.
One of the bigger changes from the newly developed software will be the availability to run the tauscan control program and its THEMIS variation.
Description of VT hardware operations (01-Oct-2011 to 17-Jan-2012):
The physical boresight and the scanning boresight are now one and the same at -40 degrees relative to geographic North.
The radar operates with a beam separation of 3.24 degrees, and has had the velocity sign of the recorded data flipped as a result of a new receiver front end design.
As of 17 Nov 2011, the new time differential for the new electronics has not been measured and thus the tdiff value is listed as a zero. It is hoped that in the coming month or so, the electrical path lengths through the new electronics can be measured.
Lastly, with the smaller beam separation, the radar has increased the number of beams it uses to 24. However, due to time constraints with certain control programs, few beams may be used at certain times.
NOTE:RAWACF data during this time was found to be using an incorrect value for the prm.lagfr and prm.frang. These parameters were found to be 4 ranges gates too close do to an error in the sample delay figure as noted below. The original data was placed within a sub-directory of the rawacf/bks directory labeled 'uncorr'. The RAWACF data was corrected on March 2, 2012 and the FITACF and FITEX data was reprocessed from this corrected data. The corrected RAWACF data should go out with the usual data distribution in early-to-mid March 2012.
For the installation of the new software at Blackstone, the following items have had to be modified:
Various settings related to setting the ROS to use the non-TS receiver card drivers, involved changing a variable called prm.gort.
The site library needed to be updated to exclude the stereoscan portions of the code.
The site library's SiteIntegrate function needed to be updated to include additional variable calls.
The site library's SiteSetBeam needed to be fully commented out and replaced instead with SiteSetPhase which is called within the SiteIntegrate function and not from the control program.
The gc214if.1.24 driver needed to be updated to include better filters hardcoded in by Ray Greenwald. This modification involves removing a calls from the main.c file to the setCFIR and setPFIR functions located in the filter.c file. Instead the main.c file uses hardcoded Bessel function coefficients that Ray obtained from an unknown website. 
The gc214if.1.24 driver was also noticed to have a sampling delay that was 4 range gates too far. Thus, a line of code that added 1 additional delay was changed to subtract 3 as noted by: smpdlyAB=(int)ceil(smpdlyF)-3;
There is also a modification to the gc214if.1.24 driver somewhere that as Ray noted 'calls bad data good and good data bad'. It appears as though it may be an interaction of the receiver driver and the acf and fitacf There is also an issue with the data processing stream that is not writing values correctly to the ACFs when the tauscan mode is run.
Also, a changed needed to be applied to the integrategc214.c library source code to correct for a miscalculation of the integration time. The IntegrateSetTock function in this c file has a few additional lines of code to account for when the intus is not equal 0.
Description of Leicester hardware operations (until 11-JUL-2011):
The physical boresite of the radar, i.e. the direction normal to the antenna array, is -40 degree relative to geographic North. However the scanning boresite, i.e. the direction of the middle beam, is cranked by 7.72 degree to -32 degree, in order to close the gap between the fields-of-view of the Wallops and the Blackstone radar.
Due to oversteering the beam width of Blackstone is 3.86 degree, i.e. about 0.6 degree larger than that of other radars.
All these changes are reflected in the hardware file.
Time delays between I/F path and main path (positive if main path is shorter)
Notes:
Channel: A
Ground Coax Delay [μs]: -0.618406
Electronics Delay: 
Total Delay [μs]: -0.648330
Mean [ns]: -29.93
StDev across frequencies [ns]: 5.62
Channel: B
Ground Coax Delay [μs]: -0.618406
Electronics Delay: 
Total Delay [μs]: -0.605700
Mean [ns]: 12.71
StDev across frequencies [ns]: 7.08

From the start of operations until 7/11/2011, the radar operated using the ROS 1.21-beta software and a pulse scheme of either stereoscan or THEMIS tauscan. The radar also used the GC214TS digital receiver card.
When operations resume in the fall of 2011, the radar will operate using the ROS 1.25 software. Also the radar will use the GC214 digital receiver card using the gc214if.1.24 driver.
Download Blackstone Hardware File