Design of an Ultrawideband Ionosonde

• Published in: IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters Vol. 12; no. 5; pp. 1042 - 1045
• Main Authors: Sun, Hengqing, Yang, Guobin, Cui, Xiao, Zhu, Peng, Jiang, ChunHua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01-05-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Digital down conversion (DDC); direct digital synthesizer (DDS); Frequency shift keying; Gain; ionogram; ionosonde; Ionosphere; Noise; Radio frequency; receiver; Receivers; transmitter; ultrawideband; direct digital synthesizer (DDS); receiver; ultrawideband; ionosonde; Digital down conversion (DDC); ionogram; transmitter
• ISSN: 1545-598X; 1558-0571
• DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2014.2376035

In this letter, an ultrawideband ionospheric sounding system was designed for ionospheric research and communication channel management. The frequency band of this ionosonde ranges from high frequency to very high frequency. It can be flexibly used at both monostatic and bistatic stations as a GPS receiver module was integrated. The system design includes three major components: control system, transmitting system, and receiver system. The operational parameters, such as frequency, waveform, and modulation type, can be manually reset. Correlation and Fourier algorithms are used to obtain a high signal-to-noise ratio and enlarge the detection range. The typical experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can be used to study the ionosphere effectively.