Measurement of the Ionospheric Reflection Height of an HF Wave in Vertical Incidence With a Resolution of Minutes

• Published in: IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters Vol. 15; no. 11; pp. 1637 - 1641
• Main Authors: Aguero Guzman, Leonardo A., Ovalle, Elias M., Reeves, Rodrigo A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01-11-2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Computer programs; Data processing; Earthquakes; Field programmable gate arrays; Frequency measurement; Gate arrays; Hardware; Height; High frequencies; Information processing; Instruments; Ionosonde; Ionosondes; Ionosphere; Measurement; Prototypes; Radio; Radio signals; Receivers; Reconfigurable hardware; Reflection; Seismic activity; Seismic measurements; Signal processing; Software; Software radio; traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs); universal software radio peripheral (USRP)
• ISSN: 1545-598X; 1558-0571
• DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2018.2856110

In this letter, we present a prototype of an RF signal receiver operating in the HF band, whose design considers the use of software-defined radio signal processing technology, based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) reconfigurable hardware and the use of gnuradio open software. The purpose of this letter is to improve the measurement rate at a fixed frequency of the reflection height, which is now obtained with a rate of 15 min using the IPS-42 ionosonde. The proposed method uses a pulse generated by the Canadian Advanced Digital Ionosonde as the transmitted signal. For the receiving section, the FPGA-based "Universal Software Radio Peripheral 1" was directly connected to a PC, where the return signals were analyzed by gnuradio. The measurements are taken with 1-min cadence, approximately, and are validated by comparing them with 15-min measurements taken with a colocated IPS-42 ionosonde. The acquisition rate of order 1 every minute is of interest in the study of a number of physical processes, i.e., traveling ionospheric disturbance, disturbances generated by seismic events, meteorological processes, and so on.