Roberto Naranjo¹, Rene Estevan² and Albio Barreiras¹

¹Technical Development Lab, Camagüey Meteorological Center, Camagüey 70100, Cuba
²Camagüey Lidar Station, Camagüey Meteorological Center, Camagüey 70100, Cuba

In October 1988, a LIDAR station designed for stratospheric aerosol monitoring was installed by specialists from the former Soviet Union at Camagüey Meteorological Polygon, (21°24' N, 77°51' W). Originally the Acquisition and Control System was composed by some cards, with minicomputer architecture with an Electronika – 60 as a host computer. Modernization in the year 1991 involves a card to interface between the PDP-11 bus and IBM XT bus from a standard PC. The software was written on C language and ran over DOS platform.

In April 1992 Russian cooperation with Cuba was interrupted, soviet specialists were retired from the station and the country with all know-how about the instrument and changes they made. Cuban personnel took over the station operation, maintenance and repairing. From January 1992 to 1998 the Lidar station operated without noticeable technical failures.

Around the end of 1998 the measurements were interrupted due to the multiple breakdowns occurrence. The difficult to solve those failures and the lack of financial resources to acquire a new Lidar station, were the main reasons to arrange a project conducted by Technical Development Laboratory (LADETEC) and Camaguey Lidar Station (CLS) teams to built and put into operation a new Control and Acquisition system for the LIDAR station.

The new system, maintaining the original laser power source, was designed to permits future reengineering as well as for changing all components that already expired their useful life cycle. It has only two cards (control – synchronism card and photo counting card). They were designed to work over Windows 98 platform on a standard PC computer. These cards permit a better control of entire system by software and add powerful capabilities to improve data quality and to achieve better secondary processing of data. Software was developed in Delphi 5 language with a friendly graphical interface. It also offers several tools for the calibration and making different measurement schedules.

This work will not only reactivate the station but with low cost will guarantee better measurement quality for ongoing and future scientific research projects.