Kira is the Kilpaschiadavi atmospheric imaging receiver array. It is a new phased array receiver system which is being built at Kilpaschiadavi in northern Finland. It will be used to study the atmosphere and also conduct some radio astronomy projects. The ASCAT Scientific Association was established in the mid-70s in order to run large inquiries guitar radars on the mainland in Europe. Inquiries guitar radars are radars which measure the ionosphere that part of the atmosphere where the northern lights have. Of these radars the oldest radar is most noteworthy. It is the ASCAT UHF system which is based not only in Thompson where the transmitter receiver system is but also it has additional receivers in Kirunai, northern Sweden and in Sudan in northern Finland. This means it is the only tri-static radar system of its kind in the world and it is able to measure three-dimensional vector velocities at one specific point in the upper atmosphere. The ASCAT Scientific Association is planning to build the next generation radar which is called ASCAT 3D which is a large radar system scattered across northern Scandinavia and Finland which will eventually replace the ASCAT UHF system. This ASCAT 3D system is based on a different measurement principle than the existing radars and we build the Kaira facility to do prototyping work and try out how an array antenna like Kaira can receive the signals from the ASCAT antennas. The current ASCAT radars due to the way they are built they can see a part of the ionosphere which is about the shape of maybe a long beam pencil into the ionosphere. That means their field of view is extremely limited. A phased array is completely different to a conventional dish antenna. A conventional dish antenna you have one large metal structure which focuses all the radio energy onto a single point where the receiver is. In order to look in different directions you physically move the dish and point it at the direction you want to look. The way that a phased array operates is that you actually have lots and lots of small antennas. By changing the delays on the signals from each of these antennas you can actually control electronically which direction the antennas as a collective group are sensitive to. This allows you to change the direction that you are looking very rapidly and it also gives you more flexibility in terms of the pointing directions overall that you can generate from the system. Kaira is capable of pointing in multiple directions at once because as a digital system it can also change the direction in which it is looking extremely quickly. The conventional ice-cat dishes on the other hand being large mechanical structures are limited to looking at a single direction at any given time and they take a long time to move from one side to the other. By having a phased array where all the steering is done digitally in computing or in the electronics itself then that means that there are no physical moving parts within the system. This makes them a lot more robust in an Arctic environment. Building in the Arctic is always a challenge. Apart from the rugged terrain there is the obvious cold conditions which have major impacts on foundations for building structures, electrical systems and also the problems that you can get from icing around the system. By putting the system up on frames not only do you get it up out of the ground snow but also there is a wind-sheered factor. The further away from the ground to go the higher the wind velocity and the natural increase of the wind speed will allow natural wind clearing of the snow off the top of the tiles. What you want to do is you want to minimize the total amount of snow that is on the tile. Not because you are trying to keep the weight down, the tiles are very strong and we will withstand that easily but because you don't want too much snow depth because that actually detracts from the radio signal or the radio signal that is coming into the tile. Kyra is used for prototyping and it is meant to receive the signals from the ASCAD VHF antenna system based in Tromsø. Kyra is also financed by the University of Olu which is a Finnish entity. Therefore it has to be on Finnish territory but as close as possible to the existing Tromsø VHF radar. Therefore we place it in Kiltbysjavi because Kiltbysjavi is the closest point to Tromsø on Finnish territory. ASCAD is the organisation which plans and builds the next generation ASCAD 3D radar. The University of Olu is a contract partner in a development project of the European Union to plan this new radar system. This is the partnership between ASCAD and the University of Olu but in order to do the Kyra project we bought an off-the-shelf receiver system which was readily available from our astronomy colleagues from the Lofa project. The coolest thing about Kyra is that it is so wide-band it can receive frequencies all the way from maybe 20 MHz up to 250 MHz, with the only exception of the FM radio band. And as such we can receive radio waves not only from the ASCAD radar but from any other atmospheric radar system in the vicinity here in Scandinavia. For example the ASCAD radar systems in Tromsø and on Andeja and then in Kirona in northern Sweden and possibly we can also receive signals from the sodancola atmospheric radars and we can see what kind of exciting new science comes out of this. I think probably the most interesting thing that Kyra will attempt is Rhyometry. This is a technique that is used for measuring the opacity of the ionosphere. This is a technique that if we can perfect it at the Kyra site we then have the option of deploying the same software on all the other Lofa sites around Europe. This will give us a huge collecting area which will allow us to do lots of experiments for Rhyometry across the entire northwest Europe. What we want to do is ASCAD 3D, we want to monitor a large volume of space simultaneously so that we can distinguish whether processes that we are seeing happen in time or in space.