Ionospheric Tool Expands to South America Published Jan. 9, 2012 By Eva Blaylock, AFRL/RVOT Space Vehicles KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, New Mexico -- The Scintillation Network Decision Aid (SCINDA), a system designed to specify ionospheric scintillation in real time, has now installed UHF and GPS scintillation monitoring equipment at Apiay Air Base, Colombia. The installation expanded the SCINDA network in South America. SCINDA includes dual software digital radio receivers capable of simultaneously monitoring scintillation activity on 16 SATCOM channels. As part of real-time SCINDA network, data from the new site will significantly increase regional scintillation monitoring capabilities. Following quality testing at Air Force Research Laboratory, the data will be used in operational products for the UHF SATCOM community hosted at the Air Force Weather Agency. SCINDA is currently a prototype system and is fielded at stations in South America. It is envisaged that SCINDA sites will be set up around the globe to provide data to the warfighter. Timely location of outage regions would enable the warfighter to effectively use satellite communication, navigation, or surveillance assets to modify mission plans and prevent errors as scintillation warnings become available. SCINDA provides the warfighter with an efficient, graphical interface needed to evaluate the effects of local ionospheric scintillation on critical military space communication and navigation links. Specialized ground-based UHF and L-Band receivers, monitoring signals from geosynchronous communication satellites, are used to measure scintillation intensities and zonal drift velocities. Sites are connected to the Internet, providing the warfighter with an automated local real-time data retrieval system. The SCINDA decision-aid software then processes this data and generates a three-dimensional real-time local visualization of the ionospheric disturbance structure.