As the number of radars increases, the use of a single letter as a radar identifier becomes both confusing and eventually impractical. This proposal will replace the single letter identifier with a short text string.

1. Introduction

SuperDARN Radars have always been identified by two methods. Within the software, each radar is identified by a unique station Identifier number. These numbers are difficult to remember and are very confusing to a normal human operator, consequently each radar is also assigned a single character station ID code.

When the number of radars was comparitively small, this approach worked well, with each radar receiving an appropriate ID letter, such as "g" for Goose Bay, and "k" for Kapuskasing. However as the number of radars has increased the number of available letters has decreased and the codes have become less logical and harder to remember.As the number of proposed radars now exceeds 26, it has been decided that the radar identifier should be changed to a short text string that is easy to remember.

2. Proposed format for the radar identifer

The proposed format is summarised below:

• The radar identifier will be changed to a short three letter text string.
• Software should be capable of handling arbitrary length strings, for future expansion.
• The three letter identifier will use lower case characters.
• Software should treat the identifier as case sensitive.

2.1 Aliases

Radar identifiers will be allowed to have aliases. For existing radars, the principal alias will be the existing single character identifier code. This approach will allow backwards compatibility as a radar can be referenced either by the new identifier or the old.