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HAARP Amping It Up
n6kuy writes "HAARP (the High frequency Active Auroral Research Program) will be adding 132 more transmitters to bring their total number of transmitters to 180.
"When the massive planar array for ionospheric research is completed in 2007, it will include a total of 180 Continental Electronics D616G 10-kW combined transmitters, which the company is upgrading specifically for HAARP," the supplier (Continental) stated. The facility is near Gakona, Alaska.
The installation began in 1993 with 18 transmitters, expanded to 48 in 1998 and will grow to 180 transmitters. The final expansion will bring the HAARP array to full power, with ERP increasing from 84 dBW to about 96 dBW.
96dBW is about 4 billion Watts.
There is speculation that the project is really an "effort to develop ways to jam the electronics of incoming missiles from Russia and/or China".
4 billion Watts oughtta do it."
Does it go up to 11?
HAARP is a United States defense project, one of the many defense measures against nuclear warfare. For more information, see this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAARP (Wikipedia.org)
It's obviously a time travel experiment.
4 Gigawatts is enough to power 3 DeLoreans with power to spare.
They can use it to boost the new nintendo wifi coverage.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
FTFSpeculation: "it seems to me like it's some efffort to develop ways to jam the electronics of incoming missiles from Russia and/or China (I don't think it's an accident HAARP's initial funding came from Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative)"
/tinfoil (not aluminum foil) hat half-off
It could also be that the Star Wars Initiative was based on satellites being able to communicate, and communication in the ionosphere (with endemic electrical currents) was thought to be possibly very tricky, especially in latitudes where the northern lights are a visible manifestation of such.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
When I was a wee lad, I had a very interesting, somewhat cranky physics professor. I had bought a several-milliwatt helium-neon laser tube via catalog. Due to a typo, they had claimed its power as something like 4MW, which I interpereted to mean it literally was four megawatts. I was ecstatic and couldn't wait to share my great good fortune with my prof.
I showed the prof the ad, and told him that when the laser came in, maybe we could try it out.
He repeated "4 megawatts? What are you going to do, shoot planes down?"
I said, "Nah, I'm a pacifist. Maybe we can zap one'a them light poles around the quad. Besides, it says so right there. 4MW."
He said "Ah, so it does. And it takes a 9-volt battery?"
I said, "It's got a transformer."
He clenched his lips together extremely tightly, and screwed his eyes shut. He looked briefly like he was rumbling. Then, he gained control over it and said, "Well, you'll have to bring that baby in, kid. I'll be right back..."
Years later, looking back, I'm pleased I was able to give a man his age the belly laugh I'm sure he went out in the hall to enjoy. It's the little pleasures that make life worthwhile...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
You've gotta love the unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP. Jamming the Chinese is the only plausible alternate explanation I've heard yet. If people are so convinced that something evil is going on up there, how about asking some of the grad students at University of Alaska? Everybody knows grad students will sing for a mere six pack or an offer to show their resume to your boss.
The array has so far produced localized auroras (go Google it yourself, I'm not your mother), which is one of the effects it was predicted to be able to achieve in addition to providing a theoretical way to improve radio reception, but I've heard some great crackpot theories. Most come from the tin-foil hat people who think it's a mind control device, but there's some lame stuff like destroying the ozone layer over only blue or only red states so Democrats/Republicans will all die of skin cancer or find oil sources for the big companies with government funding. The best, however, is the suggestion that it controls earthquakes. 'HAARP' + 'earthquake' is an entertaining google search. Iran, Sumatra, you name it. It was a secret government attack. Oh yeah, don't forget Hurricane Katrina. Obviously a creation of HAARP.
But, four billion watts is a lot of power. The HAARP power page says that for every four watts of power transmitted, ten must be generated (40% efficiency). That's ten gigawatts, and the six diesel generators mentioned on the site produce only fifteen megawatts. Where does the extra power come from?
It's not actually 4GW. It's only 3.6MW peak envelope power. 4GW is the max ERP, or effective radiated power, under optimal conditions. ERP accounts for antenna gain. In other words, the field strength is the same as that from a 4GW transmitter with an isotropically radiating antenna.
See the HAARP site's technical info on phases of completion at: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/phases.html
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Actually, to be more specific, the D-region is formed by solar Lyman alpha photoionization of nitric oxide (NO), with a smaller and more variable contribution from soft X-rays ionizing N2 and O2.
HF radio waves are absorbed mostly in the D-region, and at times can be completely blacked out by elevated electron densities caused by various ionospheric disturbances, including solar X-ray flares and "Polar Cap Absorption" events caused by solar proton events.
The solar (extreme ultraviolet, shortwards of Lyman alpha) flux photoionizes the neutral atmosphere (mostly N2 and O2) creating ions by ejecting photoelectrons from the neutral molecules. These photoelectrons have energies typically up to about 100 eV (electron Volts). The "hot" photoelectrons collide with the cold ambient ionospheric electrons through the Coulomb interaction thereby heating the ionospheric electrons.
The radar heats ionospheric electrons to only a fraction of an eV. However, there are enough electrons in the tail of the heated Maxwellian distribution to excite the atomic oxygen auroral "red line" emission at 6300 Angstroms (630 nm), which has an excitation threshold of 1.96 eV. This red glow produced by radar heating is visible from the ground (with instruments).
I'm one of the "experts" quoted on the HAARP site, although I have absolutely nothing to do with it. However, I find the conspiracy theories regarding HAARP quite amusing. Why? because I can calculate exactly what the radar is doing - that's how I make my living.
The most famous haarp practitioner I know of was definitely a Marx-ist...
Just to make sure that everybody is up to speed on that stated power, Let me Clarify something about antenna radiation. What was quoted was 4 billion watts ERP. The term ERP means Effective Radiated Power compared to that of a simple dipole antenna. This is a sort of measure of power density, not absolute power. Power stated as ERP is a measure of the power radiated and how narrow the radiation beam is. High ERP power is very much like looking at a narrow laser beam from a great distance. The beam looks bright, so if you think that the light is coming from a source that is shining in all directions, then it is as if the light source is shining with megawatts of power. Although the beam is bright, it is very narrow in extent, thus the real power radiated is small. For antennas, the beam width is proportional to a measure called antenna Gain. Large arrays of antennas like the HAARP antenna farm have VERY high gains, thus very directional radiation beams. IT is more likely that HAARP antenna array has a collective gain near 1000, thus the real power is more like 4 megawatts, not gigawatts (something that can be supplied by on base generators).
Megawatts of RF power is big, but not big enough to knock down ICBMs. The Idea with HAARP is to use the RF power to heat the Ionosphere in the northern latitudes where there are enormous currents induced by the Aurora. The power sloshing around in the upper Ionosphere is of the order of Terawatts. They hope to modulate these rivers of currents by locally heating small spots in the ionosphere plasma, thus radiating gigawatts of power at ultra low frequencies ( 1 to 100 Hz)... a very cool Mad scientist Idea... Very evil..
DR. Null