Radio & Radar Systems
HF/VHF Radar


Ionospheric diagnostics motivated the early creation of the HF/VHF radar. The radar uses modern electronics and software radio architecture. It provides extreme flexibility and convenient operation.

It provides a variety of waveforms, space-time sampling, fast operation, and flexible architecture. It can act as a sophisticated digital ionosonde. Further, it can diagnose HF in the ionosphere. It consists of a high-performance digital receiver, programmable transmitter, and a generalized radar controller.

Advanced Ionospheric Sounder
Monostatic and bistatic operation are allowable. Users can employ the sounder in partial reflection, wave interaction, or HF signal analysis, during either normal or ionospheric modification activities. It can act as versatile HF radar or drive VHF or UHF radar systems. It uses standardized radar controller architecture (Universal Radar Controller). The software-based system allows easy user interface. Its built-in analysis modules include the following:
  • Ionosonde Scaling
  • Inversion
  • Ray Tracing

The sounder also has visualization tools, and an extremely intuitive and user-friendly GUI for manipulation and control. Essentially, it lets most post-processing take place within the system in near-real-time. The typical learning process takes less than 30 minutes. Various levels of software are built-in. Users could operate the system at various levels of sophistication from high-level commands (specifying standard operational modes like ionogram, fixed frequency, stepped frequency, absorption, DOA, or Doppler), down to controlling every IPP. Almost all parameters in the transmitter and receiver systems can change from IPP to IPP. Some of its features include:

  • Monostatic and bistatic operation.
  • Chirp sounding.
  • Conventional ionosonde.
  • HF diagnostics during normal and heating operations. These diagnostics include absorption, phase, height, polarization, DOA, spatial correlation using multiple antennas, frequency correlation and spectral analysis.
  • Radar controller for driving VHF/UHF, incoherent scatter radars.
  • Different modes including: single frequency, stepped frequency, DOA, Doppler, interferometry, IDA, wave interaction, partial reflection, ionosonde and absorption.
  • Complete, instantaneous frequency and waveform control pulse-to-pulse including CW, pulse, FM, Chirp, phase-coded, binary-coded, complimentary-coded receiver gain, bandwidth, frequency, polarization.
  • Instantly adjustable transmitter parameters: frequency, power, antenna, polarization.
  • Superior receiver and transmitter specifications, including dynamic range, bandwidth control, gain stability, frequency stability, noise figure and transmitter power.
  • Ability to multiplex multiple antennas and receivers and switch them in and out.
  • Agile operation. Users can control most parameters pulse-to-pulse.
  • Self-diagnostics.
  • Self-calibration.
  • Versatile user interface, allowing scheduling, operation and analysis in a user-friendly manner.
  • Various analysis tools for post-processing.
  • Remote operation, control and analysis

HF Diagnostics Module (PDF)