The new ionospheric station of San Miguel de Tucumán

At the end of August 2007 an Advanced Ionospheric Sounder (AIS), built at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, Italy, was installed at San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina (geographical coordinates: 26.9 S, 294.6 E; magnetic coordinates: 15.5 S, 3.8 E), particularly interesting for its location, near the southern peak of the equatorial anomaly. AIS-INGV is a digital low-power pulse-compressed ionosonde. In order to reduce the transmitted power, weight, size, power consumption, and to have an excellent reliability, advanced HF-radar techniques were employed. The ionosonde is also equipped with Autoscala, a software able to perform an automatic scaling of the ionogram