1. Report about MEXART and plans its use as a dedicated IPS system Esmeralda Romero-Hernandez; Julio Mejia-Ambriz; J. Americo Gonzalez- Esparza Institute of Geophysics UNAM

2. MEXART is located in Michoacan, Mexico (19°48’ N 101°41’ W). It is a radio telescope dedicated to carry out observations of distant radio sources at 140 MHz. The aim is to perform solar wind studies using the Interplanetary Scintillation (IPS) technique. ANTENNA. The antenna is a plane array of 64 rows of 64 dipoles (4096 dipoles) aligned in E-W direction, covering 9600 m 2. Technical Characteristics Operation frequency: 139.65 MHz Basic element : dipole ( λ= 2.15 m) Band width : 2 MHz Time constant: 47 ms Sampling rate: 20 ms Efective area (1/4 of array): 1650 m 2. Effective area (full array): 6600 m 2. FWHM in E-W direction of beams: 1° MEXART

4. In the website you can see real time transits: This is a transit of some strongest radio sources detected by MEXART

5. Current configuration of MEXART  The technical team moved the half antenna (G1 and G2) to the other half (to G3 and G4). This process gave the opportunity to check and fix technical details.  The technical team bought new amplifiers wich are going to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in a 30 %.  At this moment, MEXART is operating with only a quater of the total array, but we are expecting that MEXART starts its operation with a half of the array on August.

6. A preliminar analysis showed that signal-to-noise ratio has been increase significantly with this new configuration. # of radio sourcesObservational minimum detectable flux (Jy) ¼ of array (2010)6718 ¼ of array (2012) ~ 7 015

7. MEXART is in the best step to make interplanetary scintillation observations. I will present the first analysis with this new configuration in AGU. In conclusion …