The VHF meteor radar system used during the Arecibo Initiative in Dynamics of the Atmosphere (AIDA) campaign '89

During the AIDA 1989 campaign, a 49.92 MHz meteor scatter radar was deployed in the Lajas valley of southwest Puerto Rico. The principal motivation for this effort was to provide support for a validation study of neutral winds measurement techniques in the mesosphere. This paper provides a description of the VHF radar design, the associated radar processor and the methods used to analyze the data. Procedures adopted to check the integrity of the system are discussed along with the limits of the measurement process. Initial observations of mesospheric quantities are presented to illustrate system performance.