HAARP Amping It Up 292
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."
Wow big suprise US spending billions on defense (Score:1, Interesting)
Shit (Score:2, Interesting)
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
idle spec (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This only works at night? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Ionospheric heating cannot be performed while the sun illuminates the ionosphere for two reasons:
* Solar UV creates the ionospheric D-region, which absorbs the radio waves used for ionospheric heating.
* The solar flux overwhelms any effect of ionospheric heating. "
I have no idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
But, four billion watts is a lot of power. The HAARP [alaska.edu] 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? Capacitors? If so, it would only be able to produce a single large pulse. That would be pretty useless against missiles (which wouldn't all come at once).
Re:This only works at night? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It's not just for missile defense... (Score:1, Interesting)
I've been to HAARP... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Negative Effects (Score:3, Interesting)
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Ionospheric physicists have two general attitudes about about HAARP.
(1) it's a cool facility which permits manipulation of the bottomside F region plasma physics, and provides an opportunity to study some intriguing plasma physics (3 and 4 wave interactions), as well as some thermospheric chemistry.
(2) It's yet-another-boondoggle from the Stevens/Murchowski axis, bringing pork to AK for no good reason, to support a need which no longer exists (how to communicate with subs, so that they can bomb whoever is threatening our precious bodily fluids [URL:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012]).
HAARP is not the only ionospheric heater on the planet. There is another one at Tromso, Norway (Ramfjordmoen), and there has been one at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It got flooded and broke; they'd like to rebuild it. There are probably others in Russia somewhere.
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I'm an ionospheric physicist, and I vote.
Pluck a guitar string one one side of the room... (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay. .
During the big world wars, generals learned that they needed to march troops across bridges with their footfalls out of phase with each other. It was found that if the soldiers marched in perfect time with one another, the energy from a few thousand stomping feet would enter the bridge structure and set it to vibrating. A standing wave was able then to build until the bridge shook itself apart and collapsed. This isn't 'mystery school' stuff. It's basic, "Let's not kill our troops and destroy our bridges while marching across them," applied science.
Take the thought a step further. .
"The Walls of Jericho came tumbling down."
Some say, 'Divinely timed Earthquake'. Others say, 'Wrath of God'. I say, 'Maybe a standing waveform deliberately created by marching the army around the city for long enough to knock it down.' --Yeah it takes some creative editing of the biblical account to consider it, but hey, it's not like the bible hasn't been severely distorted over two thousand years of manipulative re-writes, (from the mind-control, social-engineering project heavily influenced by the Roman secret services it was originally, that is).
.
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Okay. Back to reality. .
Experiment: "You put a fish in a tank and mount a speaker to the side of the tank. Over the speaker, you emit a sub-sonic beat. Tune the beat to match the beating of the fish's heart and let the two beats stay in sync for a while. Then slowly start to turn down the frequency on the speaker and observe as the fish's heart also slows. Gradually reduce the frequency until the fish's heart stops altogether, killing the fish.
Hm.
Okay. So this HAARP thing. .
Weather control? I don't think so. --The weather is messed up enough on it's own these days, and you can make a lot more money selling weapons to the people you want killing each other than you can by drying up their rice paddies. (Remember, the Carlyle Groups of the world don't own stocks in farming ventures. They sell guns.) --Of course, in an armchair-tactician, war-book reading, pipe-smoking, Napoleonic-War-Geek kind of way, a weather control weapon makes a lot of sense. However, in the real world of the Military Industrial Complex, where winning wars and playing Risk are only cursory concerns on the list of objectives, (all nations already being under one master and the illusion of politics being simply a distraction and misery engine), weather control is sort of pointless. --Simply an idea to toss out to the New Age crazies who can be counted upon to make everybody cough awkwardly and look the other way for fear of being associated with conspiracy theory.
What makes more sense is using the HAARP array to pump energy into a section of the ionosphere so that you create a standing wave in the medium of the ionosphere, which will vibrate at the same frequency as human brain wave patterns. . . (Like fish hearts, different states of awareness and feelings can be created in people through such EM manipulation.)
If you set up another couple of arrays in Europe and around the world, (which do indeed exist), performing the same task, suddenly you have the ability to create gridworks of standing wave interference patterns which cover the planet and which can be manipulated and tuned with accuracy, turning the Ionosphere into a sort of spherical television screen.
--You know those days when everybody in your town is feeling buzzed out and crazy and you blame it on the barometer, or the full moon,
Re:post ww2 construction made usa rich (Score:1, Interesting)
Destruction of capital (when refering to funds it's spelled with an a) does not cause the economy to grow but causes it to shrink. What you are proposing is something known as the Broken Window Fallacy [wikipedia.org].
Your idea that no one would ever buy anything new if their old things didn't break is also absurd. The most obvious counter example is fashion. Clothes go out of style and hence new clothes must be purchased. The old clothes are still perfectly functional they just no longer match the current social aesthetics. Another counter example is new technology. Even if everyone had everything they wanted before 2001 and the release of the ipod, suddenly there is something that they do not have and they do want. Additionally, if things never wore out it would greatly stimulate the economy as there would be a large amount of capitol freed up for the purchase of other goods or to invest in the creation of new goods.
What grows the economy is increases in efficiencies and new consumers. In the future, if you want to use economics to explain something perhaps you should bother to learn some first.