Space Weather Systems
HF Diagnostic System for Ionosphere
     

Advanced Ionospheric Sounder
A modern HF sounder using recent developments in analog and digital electronics and computers has been developed and is available for commercialization. The sounder is completely software driven and fully exploits digital technologies. It is entirely flexible and can easily be configured for HF diagnosis, channel monitoring, and characterization. Of course, it can also operate in conventional and advanced ionosonde mode.

 

  

Monstatic and bistatic operation is allowable.  Users can employ it 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.

Ionosonde Features:

  • 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.
  • Real-time visualization of various parameters.
  • 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)