Dome C East

DOME C (75.090 S, 123.350 E)
The SuperDARN radar at Dome C began operations in January 2013. It forms a common-volume pair with the SuperDARN radar located at South Pole Station (U.S.). The electronics for the radar are based on the University of Saskatchewan design. The start date for data availability is 20130123.
The PI for the Dome C East radar is Dr. Maria Frederica Marcucci of the INAF-Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali (Rome). She took over from the original PI, Dr. Ermanno Amata (2013-2016) at the SuperDARN 2016 Workshop in Fairbanks, Alaska.
The radar is located at 1.4 km from the Franco-Italian base Concordia, at Dome C, i.e., very close to the Antarctic geomagnetic pole, at about 3200 m above sea level. This makes it the highest geomagnetic latitude radar and the highest altitude radar.
The construction of the SuperDARN Dome C East (DCE) radar at Concordia Research Station was constructed with the support of Italian and French funding agencies and it is now maintained with the support of the Italian National Program for Antarctic Research (PNRA). The contributing agencies are:
Italy:
    Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide (PNRA)
    Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)
    Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)
France:
    Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV)
    Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers (INSU)
24-OCT-2018: Note from Fredercca: Our team will arrive in Dome C beginning of November, in order to fix up DCE and complete the DCN installation. Also Jan Wiid will join the team in January. What I really hope, apart from the successful completion and first light tof DCN, is that we can assess that the last five month DCE data, even if affected, are still usable.
Rome, 21 January 2016. David Biondi (INAF-IAPS) and Enrico Simeoli (CNR-Reti e Sistemi Informativi) (pictured below) are just back to Italy from Dome C, Antarctica, after a 10 days trip.
They first flew from Dome C to the Italian Mario Zucchelli station on a Twin Otter; then they were transferred from Mario Zucchelli to Christchurch, New Zealand, by the Italica cargo ship. From Christchurch they flew back to Rome. David and Enrico had arrived at Dome C at the beginning of November 2015. At Dome C they first successfully fulfilled their mission of taking the Dome C East radar back to life.
A power line failure at the end of July 2015, had left the DCE radar electronics below -60 degrees Celsius for several days, until Dome C winterers succeeded in repairing the power line. David and Enrico found out that only PC Main had been damaged and replaced it. DCE started to operate again on 24 November 2015. After that, “normal” (if anything can be called "normal" at Dome C.!) maintenance of antennae and other radar systems was performed.
Thanks a lot to David, Enrico, Corrado Leone (CNR-DTA), who performed the DCE maintenance in the past years, and to all the people who helped them at Dome C!
Notes:
The Dome C radar currently uses ROS.1.20 software.
Beam Separation Sign: Northern hemisphere radars count beam 0 as the westernmost beam, which is the leftmost beam. Historically southern hemisphere radars did the same westernmost, which is the rightmost beam, meaning the beam separation would be negative. However, when dce was setup, the leftmost beam is beam 0. This is why the beam separation is positive for dce.
Note from Ermanno, ===radar down=== on July 30, 2015:
I am sorry to inform you that on Sunday 20th of July the electrical supply of the whole DCE shelter at Dome C was suddenly interrupted due to the rupture of a cable. As a result, until Friday 24th the shelter remained unpowered at temperatures ranging from -58°C to -70°C (and so did the MAIN and the TIMING PC, the power transmitters and the phasing matrix).
Since Friday 24th the shelter is begin kept at a temperature between 10° and 20° C using heaters, while all the radar systems are off. In this situation, I believe that one should individually test all the radar subsystems before attempting to switch on the radar as a whole. However, the winter Dome C personnel have not been trained to perform such tests. As the radar electronics was built at UoS, I have asked Kathryn McWlliams of UoS for the advice of her engineers on the procedure we should follow in order to try to bring the radar back to life.
Download Dome C East Hardware File