totse.com | HAARP: FAQ and Glossary

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One thing I've found out in writing about radios and technical subjects is the relative impenetrability of the jargon. We think about kilohertz and phase-angles as if they were part of our lives, because they are. It's like the Eskimos and all their words for snow. But snow is indeed what happens if we do not define our terms.

This is difficult. Defining a 'radio wave' is a bit like defining sunshine. We know what it is, but mostly nonverbally or (worse) mathematically. Therefore this glossary is very hard to write, and given the complexity of ionospheric physics it will always be a bit embryonic and imprecise. Those needing precise, mathematical definitions should consult university-level science texts. Be prepared to review calculus!

HAARP is a radio transmitter. It works exactly like the ones in standard, AM stations like the ones you listen to every day, except for three differences:

(A large U.S. station is 50,000 watts. HAARP will deliver about 20-30 times that, not counting antenna gain.)

3.The antenna is completely different. (AM stations use vertical towers, to direct power along the Earth's surface. HAARP uses a complex antenna that concentrates the entire beam on a small area of the sky.)

Think about when you were a kid, and how it was fun to burn holes in leaves with a magnifying glass. This analogy works, very superficially, for HAARP. Instead of focusing the sun's rays to heat a tiny area of the leaf, it focuses radio waves to heat a tiny area of the earth's atmosphere. However, no oxidation takes place. The air is much too thin for this.

This process is caused ionospheric heating. Short wave broadcasting stations do it, on a much, much smaller scale, every day.

As with any heating process, an external energy source increases the motions of particles in that which is being heated. In this case, the process is not thermal but electrical, since charged particles are being heated. The result is an expansion.

It's stirring up the ionosphere, a series of charged layers made up of very thin, ionized air, from 40 to 300 miles up in the atmosphere. This kind of heating seeks to influence the spirals that charged particles, notably electrons, make around the Earth's magnetic lines, thus changing electrical currents that move continuously around our planet. Such heating is invisible, except possibly for some dim, auroral glow. A space shuttle orbiting in the vicinity would see no obvious changes, except possibly for one hell of a radio signal. The effect is electrical. Like any heated plasma, the tiny ionospheric section thins and expands. This greatly changes its effect on all radio signals.

HAARP, like most such heaters, gets much of its bang from its position, which takes advantage of the angle of the Earth's magnetic field. The second "A" is for "Auroral," as in the "Northern Lights." HAARP is not strong enough to cause anything but the tiniest approximation of an aurora, but it is well situated to influence the natural one.

Some of his writings, notably the ones on wireless transmission of electrical power, spoke of resonance and standing waves. A similar effect was mentioned in Eastlund's work.

The original, Eastlund patent cites the "gyrofrequency." This is merely the radio frequency, in kHz, that matches the time it takes an ionospheric electron to spiral around a magnetic line. HAARP uses the gyrofrequency to achieve a resonance, or a tuned condition in which a small kick makes a big effect - more bang for the buck. Resonance is already used in most radio circuits. It's how you "tune in" a station. Tesla studied resonance for many years, with some dramatic results.

It has been shown, at EISCAT, a larger heater in Norway, that the right kind of resonant auroral stimulation can actually cause feeble, controllable fluctuations in the auroral "electrojet," a sort of electric jet stream that flows around our planet. This electrojet grows stronger in visible aurora, but it is always present to some degree. Modification opens some very interesting possibilities, such as the generation of secondary radio waves with extremely low frequencies (ELF).

The military is excited about such ELF waves, because it uses them for communicating with submarines. They penetrate water, at least to a shallow depth, which ordinary radio waves just don't do. Also, the right kind of ELF would allow remote sensing and tomography of the deep underground - giving the earth a non-ionizing type of "CAT scan" without X-rays, which wouldn't work on this scale. It might be possible to map deeply buried missile bases, pipelines, bomb shelters, and more.

Anything past this is pure conjecture. Aurora has been connected with brain waves and weather modification, but nothing is proven.

HAARP is unclassified, though some of its experiments might not be. It's like the space shuttle.

Most of its use is just what they say it is - scientific research. It is, in fact, only one of several such facilities. An even larger one is being built in Norway. Other heaters exist in Russia and Puerto Rico (to study the equatorial ring current?). Either these people are onto something, or an awful lot of academic/industrial/military types just ensured their job security into the next century.

Burning involves oxidation, which cannot take place in such thin air. Keep in mind that the ionosphere, especially higher up, is practically a vacuum. There isn't a lot of there, there. The space shuttle actually orbits in its upper layer. The "holes" referred to in military papers probably refer to some sort of localized, space- based, ionospheric modification to improve signals to/from geosynchronous satellites above combat zones.

Oh, most definitely. The DoD has been investigating every possible way of modifying the ionosphere. The Tethered Satellite System on the space shuttle had some vaguely stated research aims here, along with the publicly declared mission of generating electricity. The CRRES satellite caused disturbances strong enough to be seen from the ground.

No. It is a device for creating localized ones. This is not to say, however, that wide deployment of resulting technology will not someday affect the ionosphere worldwide, with unforseen consequences.

Almost certainly not. Compared to the energy coming from the sun, HAARP is a weenie roast. It can create only a tiny fraction of the planetary effects of a magnetic storm, such as the ones expected around 2000 when the solar cycle peaks. It cannot knock out power, change the weather or disrupt communication, except perhaps in a very, very limited area that might be useful for tactical situations.

Though their information suffers from the usual credibility problems of anything coming from the military, it's worth checking the Navy's web page to see if HAARP was even transmitting when something happened.

We don't know. At its proposed power level, very, very probably not. The laws of physics require a radio transmitter of almost apocalyptic power, an Eastlund machine or larger, to make even a small difference over a useful area of the sky. Nuclear bombs would do it better and cheaper. Of course, the precise connection between the ionosphere and upper-level meterology is not well understood, though there is very good evidence that there is one.

This pattern, which is based on a jet stream displaced from its traditional position over North America, seemed to start in the 70s, well before any ionospheric heaters were operating at any kind of reasonable field strength. More likely, the unpredictable jet stream, the augmented El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the other anomalies are due to volcanism, global warming, mere statistical artifacts, all of the above, or none of the above.

It certainly is. The first inklings that something was up at the Gakona site came from FAA memos about possible future RF hazards. HAARP will apparently use radar to shut the IRI down if airplanes stray into RF fields strong enough to affect navigation or safety. The hazard to birds is harder to determine. HAARP's antennas are actually much safer to wildlife than many of those used by large, shortwave broadcasters. The concern has centered on the fact that there are so many of them.

Depends on where you are, what HAARP is doing, and when it's doing it. It could range from disruptive to unnoticed. Most of the proposed emission is not of a type that causes very much interference. It's more likely that certain activities from the several heaters in the auroral zone could temporarily weaken certain polar- path signals for very short periods. In any event, ionospheric heating will never be anywhere near as disruptive as backstatter radar.

It changes the ionosphere, a part of the atmosphere upon which we depend for life itself, in ways that are not entirely predictable. On a more philosophical level, it militarizes a lower fringe of space, that treaties have long established as belonging to everyone on the planet.

It skirts the spirit, if not the letter. The U.S. has signed a number of treaties and UN agreements which largely preclude using the ionosphere as a weapon. It's more debatable as to whether any one country has a right to change everyone else's atmosphere over 50 miles up, which is technically space. Of course, international law takes a beating in wartime, and in any event the law always seems to lag behind technology.

This is always a good one, because "They" already have. They built a real nice one, at SURA. The main effect upon the United States was to give the U.S. military another place to do heating research, and it has done just that. Glasnost at work, I guess. So the alarmists can come out of their fallout shelters now, and get a life.

Streams of energetic particles, mostly electrons, that originate in the solar wind, and are trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. When these particles collide with atoms in the ionosphere, a number of effects can be observed, from the visible northern and southern lights to shifts in radio wave propagation. HAARP is an attempt to test the modification of this process using synchronized, high power RF.

Two vaguely-defined circles around the Arctic and Antarctic, that have the most northern and southern lights. These represent the areas above which the Earth's magnetic field reaches the right angle to guide trapped, solar particles into collisions with terrestrial ones in the atmosphere. If particle flow is strong enough, as from an enhanced solar wind, observable visible aurora (northern and southern lights) and radio aurora (a set of effects on radio reception) are the results. It is important that ionospheric heaters beam their waves into the auroral zones, as this gives the most bang per buck. The auroral zones move southward/northward in geomagnetic storms.

Acronym for Combined Release and Radiation Effect Satellite. Among other DoD missions, the satellite dumped glowing chemicals into the ionosphere to observe the disturbed results. Your taxes at work.

Decibels. A tenth of a Bel, a unit of ratio named for Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone. A dB does not measure a quantity. It measures how much bigger something is than something else. It is common to talk about a loud sound as so many decibels, but this is actually dB as referenced to a zero level that is around the threshhold of human hearing, and may or may not be weighted to match the ear.

The important thing about dB is that they're logarithmic. They follow the laws of physics in such matters, which mean that some pretty dramatic (and expensive) expansions of equipment make rather undramatic changes out at the listener's end. For example, a 50,000 watt AM radio station does not sound 45,500 watts louder than a 500-watt oat burner, everything else being equal. It sounds 20 dB louder. Nice, but not spectacular, except out in the fringes where it makes the whole difference. Now, if the engineer goes to 500,000 watts, as WLW ('World's Largest Wireless') once did, he only gets another 10 dB, and meanwhile the transmitter is starting to look (and cost) like a nuclear reactor. It is, in fact, this law of physics that motivated the FCC to reduce the legal AM radio power to 50 kW. Getting a better antenna can do the rest. back

A death ray is any invisible radiation beam that can kill, presumably as quickly and effectively as a bullet. The term comes from science fiction, but apparently also refers to a real or imaginary weapon that the U.S. military proposed or designed in World War II. Rumors that Nikola Tesla was in on some secret project gained credence in some areas when the government confiscated all Tesla's papers upon his death, although it is very possible that the Feds were going on the same rumors. Particle and photon beams were re-investigated for SDI. (See SDI.) back

One of the four known 'cosmic forces' from which all energy comes. Electricity and magnetism are forever associated by 'Maxwell's Equations.' Indeed, it is observed that a moving charge has an electric and a magnetic field, providing a theroretical basis for ionospheric heating.

Negatively charged particle of low mass (a 'lepton'), the motions of which are the partial basis of electricity and electromagnetism. When these motions cause energy to be transferred into space as waves of massless 'photons,' the result can be a radio wave.

Extremely Low Frequency. Often said as a whole word instead of an acronym, pronounced like Santa's little employees. Refers to the radio frequencies, typically below 3-5 kHz, where radio waves are barely even radio waves, and where they can be directly converted into audible sounds, or even electric power. The ionosphere gives off various, natural ELF waves, that sound like whistles when connected to simple audio amplifiers like in any stereo. Man-made ELF has such a long wavelength that it will penetrate water for short distances, which ordinary radio simply cannot do. This means that, at least since Nikola Tesla's time, the military has been interested in using it to communicate with submerged submarines. In fact, the United States does this, and one goal of HAARP is to determine if the current, unwieldy, miles-long antennas can be replaced with secondary emissions from the heated ionosphere.

On a more theoretical level, ELF waves can be made to synchronize with human brain waves, or various electromechanical resonances in the Earth itself. This is the phenomenon, presumably investigated secretly by both sides in the Cold War, that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories. Like all good conspiracies, none of these can be proven, since the people involved, if any, can't talk. back

The number of times a wave, or any other cyclic phenomenon for that matter, makes one complete set of changes (a cycle) in a second. Used to be measured in 'cycles per second,' but that was way too logical for radio people, so now we use 'Hertz,' the same thing.

An ominous name for a less ominous phenomenon, in which the Earth's magnetic field becomes more unstable, as measured on standard instruments and crunched into index numbers more numerous even than the ones in the stock market. As in the stock market 'tick figure' and all that, low numbers mean less volatility, greater ones mean something's up. What's up is increased solar wind, leading to increased aurora, which pushes the magnetosphere around. This is not good for power companies, satellites, and shortwave radio communication. This is good for physicists, who can write papers about things that make HAARP look like a dim bulb.

Actually, a dim bulb is what the entire province of Quebec got after an especially large storm took out their power grid in 1989. It is not yet known if a transmitter the size of HAARP can cause power failures in a similar manner. I'm not going to rule it out.

Pretend you're an electron. You were blown loose of a hydrogen atom by a solar disturbance and given a solid kick into interplanetary space. You're now near the Earth. Since you're a moving charge, and thus electricity, you are attracted by a magnet, in this case the whole planet. You are captured and spiral in toward the Earth's poles. Since you have angular momentum and all that stuff (though barely, being as much a probability wave as a particle), you don't just follow the magnetic field in a straight line. You spiral in. On the way, you meet a lot of local yokels, little particles blown from atoms in the upper atmosphere by solar EUV or other ionizing radiation.

The number of spirals per second is the gyrofrequency, and it determines how radio waves interact with you, and thus with the ionosphere in general. This frequency is usually somwhere between 4 and 10 MHz, in the HF band, and if HAARP happens to be transmitting at the moment, it can give you the biggest kick in the pants right at that frequency, because that's how you're moving anyway. Your day just got a lot more interesting. You've been heated.

You can thank the good Dr. Eastlund for putting this idea into people's heads. See, the hydrogen nuclei back on the sun warned you that Earth was a bad neighborhood, but, being a silly lepton, you did not listen...

A unit of frequency, equal to one cycle per second, named for Heinrich Hertz, who helped discover radio waves.

High Frequency. Usually pertains to the radio band between 3 and 30 MHz, which is the primary range returned to earth by the ionosphere. Also known, for our wavelength fans, as 'short wave.' Note that HF is not a very high frequency by today's standards. It was when they named it, though, when 'real' radios used spark gaps. back

HIgh Power Auroral Stimulation. A HAARP precursor, to test the principle, built by UCLA at Poker Flat.

The use, in this case, of focused radio waves to increase the energy of particles in the ionosphere, notably electrons, making them move more and causing the area thus heated to expand and thin. back

Any of 3 or 4 electrically charged (ionized) regions in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The ionosphere is created by ultraviolet and X- rays from the sun, therefore it is thickest on the sunlit side of the planet, and nearer the equator.

The D region is the lowest, at about 50 miles, and it serves mostly to absorb radio signals. The E region, around 100-150 miles, returns signals over distances from 50-300 miles. The F region, highest up at 200-300 miles, returns signals from 200-2000 miles, or globally with multiple 'hops.' On the daylight side of the Earth, the F region splits into two layers, F1 and F2, F2 being most important. On the night side, the F1 region rises and recombines with the F2. The D and E quickly disappear altogether. At the planet's 'terminator' or 'twilight zone' (two good shows, huh?), the ionosphere is in a state of change that creates 'greyline' signal propagation over some otherwise improbable paths.

The F2 region is rather thin. For example, the space shuttle usually orbits right in the middle of it. When you watch the astronauts doing EVAs on TV, they are moving around in the ionosphere. They can actually generate static electricity. Not a lot of there there, however. Shortwave radio is literally voices from thin air.

The ionosphere is also sometimes called the Kennely-Heaviside Layer, after its discoverers. back

This is a remarkable form of radio interference. Early in broadcast history, little Luxembourg discovered the commercial potential of radio, charging private ventures to build ultra-power stations to compete with government monopolies in other countries. While France exported wine, and Britain exported fine cars, Luxembourg exported photons.

Engineers were a long time figuring out why these Luxembourg flame throwers were audible on other frequencies, but only when someone else broadcast on them. The cause was ultimately proven to be a rare form of intermodulation distortion caused by the heavy- duty Luxembourg transmitters actually heating the ionosphere in sync with their modulation, impressing their audio upon the other signals. In this manner, active ionospheric modification was discovered.

The portion of space enclosed within, and thus partially controlled by, the Earth's magnetic field. It is shaped like a teardrop, with the tail away from the sun, making it the largest known structure associated with our planet.

A million watts. This is still a very high power level for radio transmitters, though there are a few stations with this kind of juice available, making them low-grade ionospheric heaters in themselves. (See Luxembourg Effect, the.) HAARP's transmitters are nothing special, but its antennas are. They concentrate the beam into an area that otherwise would require a transmitter thousands of times more powerful. (Also see Watt). back

A group of radio antennas arranged precisely on a flat surface. Typically, a computer varies the 'phase' or timing of signals to different antennas in the array, causing a beam to form in the desired direction. Some fighter planes have radar systems with planar arrays a few feet across. The one used by HAARP will be miles across, due to lower frequencies and more gain. back

A postcard, or occasionally a certificate, sent by a radio station to a listener, as an official verification that a reception report is valid. Radio hobbyists like to collect these. QSL comes from the old procedural signal for, "I am acknowledging receipt." It's how Morse code operators would 'roger' a copied message. back

Radio Frequency. Radio waves. Refers to electrical oscillations higher than what can be converted into sound (Audio Frequency or AF) and lower than frequencies/wavelengths associated with infrared light. This concept is old, from radio receiver design, and in fact much of the secondary 'RF' that might come from HAARP is of audio frequency, though still treated as RF. back

Acronym for Strategic Defense Initiative, basically a large cluster of research projects aimed at extending the U.S. military into space, or into high-tech weapons systems. The best-known, but probably the least significant, part of SDI was the infamous BRILLIANT PEBBLES, an expensive scheme to throw rocks at incoming nuclear warheads.

SDI pretty much defined the 1980s in the USA. Its awesome expenditures created several new industries, built a city or two, expanded thousands more, and pretty much put a generation to work. However, the return on the investment was low, and SDI's huge contribution to the deficit is now defining the 90s. Many SDI programs, including HAARP, are very much alive. back

Technically, a frequency band roughly synonymous with HF, in other words 3 to 30 MHz. Coloquially, any radio using a higher frequency than standard AM, and thus able to communicate over great distances using the ionosphere. HAARP uses short wave because of this optimum ionospheric interaction. back

Picture a flashlight hitting a mirror. Most of the beam will come back and make a bright spot on a wall as predicted by simple reflection, but due to imperfections in the mirror, light will also scatter around the room. Now do the same thing with high-angle beams of radio waves hitting the ionosphere, an atmospheric refractor following chaos theory as well as more basic physics. While most of the signal comes down in the skip area, enough is sidescattered and backscattered to greatly increase coverage, filling 'skip zones,' though the received signals are usually thin and fluttery, often not of commercial quality. Backscatter has a practical use in over-the-horizon radar, the 'Woodpecker' and its successors, that are so beloved in conspiracy theories.

One concern is that HAARP can generate enough sidescatter to cause interference to other short wave users. See Skip. back

A radio wave path in which a zone of weak or no reception appears between two zones of strong reception. The simplest, though least accurate, analogy, is beams bouncing from a mirror. The waves go up, skip over an area, and come down. The area skipped over is, eponymously, the 'skip zone.' Though most skip is ionospheric, it can also come from meteors, airplanes, atmospheric inversions, the moon, nearby mountains, buildings, and even hurricanes.

CB radio operators are familiar with skip. Most of the distance propagation on their band is via the F2 region. They'll suddenly hear stations 1500 miles away, often louder than the truckers on the Interstate that they usually talk to. 'Shooting skip' is technically illegal on CB, but the FCC does not especially care, and I'll never tell.

While it isn't precise, it's OK to compare radio waves with the ones in the ocean. The part of the ocean wave that you surf on is the positive peak. The trough between these is the negative peak. The distance between similar peaks is the wavelength. In radio, wavelength is the inverse of frequency, as related by the speed of light. The wavelength is the size of the radio wave, dictating how large antennas must be, and how the wave will pass through various media, among them the moving charges in the ionosphere. While we usually describe different radio stations by their frequency in kHz, earlier radios were calibrated in wavelengths, typically in meters. Thus you'll find both scales in use today. Are we on the same wavelength about this now?

A watt is a unit of work being done at a standard rate, named for the inventor of the steam engine. A horsepower, as in a car engine, works out to around 700 watts.

In radio, watts are used to measure the amount of electricity available to a transmitter to turn into RF. The largest legal ham radios may have 1000 or 1500 watts, depending on how they're measured. This sounds like about the same as a hair dryer, but the radio is less efficient, and while the dryer can be plugged into the wall, the radio probably needs heavy-duty wiring.

A large broadcasting station can have anywhere from 50,000 to a million watts, and the U.S. military has used powers over 2 MW on some frequencies. A station this big needs its own powerhouse, typically several large electric generators driven by Deisel engines. The cooling systems can resemble small nuclear reactors.