Abstract
Abstract. The history of the Juliusruh ionospheric observatory on Rügen is closely connected to the history of ground-based ionospheric sounding. After a short introduction to the ionospheric research and the sounding technique, the founding of the Juliusruh station in 1954 and its development until today are described. The different methods of ground-based sounding – as far as they apply to Juliusruh – are briefly discussed. The condition of life and work in a small team on the island of Rügen, remote from the respective parent institute, is also the subject of this article, whose author headed Juliusruh Station from 1965 to 2004.
Highlights
The discovery of the ionosphere goes back to the year 1839, when the German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss postulated that an electrically conducting region of the atmosphere could account for observed variations of the Earth’s magnetic field (Gauss, 1839)
Passive methods do not require pulse transmitters. They make use of continuous wave transmission from commercial radio stations by observing the sky-wave field strength. Another passive method is to record the radiation of cosmic noise and its attenuation (CNA) due to the ionosphere
The station was guided both by a physicist and an engineer who arrived from Berlin on a bi-weekly rotation
Summary
The discovery of the ionosphere goes back to the year 1839, when the German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss postulated that an electrically conducting region of the atmosphere could account for observed variations of the Earth’s magnetic field (Gauss, 1839). Passive methods do not require pulse transmitters They make use of continuous wave transmission from commercial radio stations by observing the sky-wave field strength (method A3). Another passive method is to record the radiation of cosmic noise and its attenuation (CNA) due to the ionosphere (method A2). A method of active ground-based sounding of the ionosphere was applied for the first time in the 1920s This method uses radio waves at frequencies between 1 and 30 MHz, vertically transmitted into the ionosphere and there completely reflected back to the Earth (Breit and Tuve, 1925). The HHI in East Berlin was headed by Professor Otto Hachenberg from 1951 to 1961 He founded the field station in Juliusruh on Rügen (Fig. 4) in 1954.
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