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The passage through Earth's ionosphere during take-off had been measured in fractions of a second. The Brainchild had reacted, but the exposure to the field had been too short to hurt her. The ionosphere of Eisberg was much deeper and, although the intensity was less, the duration was much longer.
She was the delightful girl. Such prospects made for good sleeping. And Walden was a fine world to be sleeping on. Outside the capital city its spaceport received shipments of luxuries and raw materials from halfway across the galaxy. Its landing grid reared skyward and tapped the planet's ionosphere for power with which to hoist ships to clear space and pluck down others from emptiness.
Modern OTHR installations have different transmitting and receiving sites, often located many miles apart. From the early 1950s pulsed oblique ionosphere sounders had shown that the normal ionosphere is much more stable than had previously been thought to be. The physical reason for this is that the incredibly tenuous ionized gas which does the reflecting has a molasses-like viscosity.
Over-the-horizon HF radars use the ionosphere as a kind of mirror to "see" around the curvature of the earth. They have a variety of uses, both military and civilian. And they have the advantage over line-of-sight microwave radars of being able to cover enormous areas with much less power and at a fraction of the cost of the latter.
From deep within her vitals, the throb began, a strumming, thrumming sound with a somewhat higher note imposed upon it, making a sound like that of a bass viol being plucked rapidly on its lowest string. It was not the intensity of the ionosphere that cracked the drive of the Brainchild; it was the duration.
And, since there was no ozonosphere to block out the UV radiation from the primary, the thickness of the ionosphere beneath the plasmasphere was greater. Not until the Brainchild hit the bare fringes of the upper atmosphere did she act any differently than she had in space.
But when she hit the outer fringes of the ionosphere that upper layer of rarified protons, the rapidly moving current of high velocity ions known as the plasmasphere she bucked like a kicked horse.
"Well, I suppose the atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen, mostly; then there's the ionosphere and the ozone layer. As I remember, the color of the sky is due to the scattering of light light rays being diffracted in the air." "Beyond the air," Ser Perth said impatiently. "The sky itself!" "Oh space. We were just getting out there with manned ships. Mostly vacuum, of course.
Once real-time data are matched to a model of the ionosphere, the model can be used to operate the system for the best results, based on the prevailing propagation conditions. The data for the ionospheric models take up more than 200 megabytes of computer storage space. Operators thus know when and where to expect degraded performance.
Within a few days ZS6DN had QSOs with SV1DH and SV1AB. The latter contact was a world distance record via the F-regions of the ionosphere because of the extra distance involved owing to the locations of the two Greek stations, as mentioned in the previous paragraph.
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