Welcome to Borealis’s documentation!¶
Introduction¶
Borealis is a newly developed digital radar system by the engineering team at SuperDARN Canada. It is a substantial upgrade to existing SuperDARN systems. Features of Borealis include:
Several new experimental capabilities (see New Experimental Capabilities)
Improved diagnostics and telemetry (see Borealis Monitoring and the realtime package)
Flexible and easy-to-implement experiments (see Experiments)
Direct sampling of each antenna receive path in the standard SuperDARN array, resulting in flexible post-processing of data if the samples from each antenna are stored (see antennas_iq v0.7)
A paper has been published for the Borealis system and can be found here.
This documentation attempts to capture all information required for a new user to Borealis to start from nothing and eventually have a Borealis system running. The information includes:
What SuperDARN Canada System Specifications to buy
How to interface with existing transmitters and how the Canadian radars do it
What options there are within the Borealis system and how to configure them
How to set up tests in order to verify a working system
How to write your own custom experiments
How data produced by Borealis map to formats agreed upon by the SuperDARN community
How to simulate a SuperDARN antenna array with NEC using our custom python script
And of course no documentation is complete without a list of common issues
This documentation is always being updated and refined, so please check back regularly for updates. Any comments, questions, and/or suggestions can be sent to the SuperDARN Canada team, we welcome any and all feedback, as that has helped to make the Borealis system as successful as it is today!
Limitations¶
Current limitations as of March, 2023:
Borealis does not implement clear frequency search before transmitting. Only fixed frequencies are used
The 5MHz transmit and receive bandwidths are effectively only 3.5MHz wide, as the transmit waveform near the edges of the band seem to have issues. This requires further investigation
There is currently no ability to tune centre frequencies of the USRP units in real-time
All slices of an experiment must have the same decimation scheme
Roadmap¶
In the near future, we plan to implement:
The option to have pulse compression using 13-bit Barker codes on the transmit pulses
The option to use a clear frequency search
Continual improvements to the code-base and documentation