HF multipath dispersion measurements using cepstral signal processing

Abstract

A technique for measuring ionospheric echo arrival times and strengths is described. The technique uses ordinary HF‐SSB transceivers and an easy to generate probe signal. It is based on the cepstral signal processing tool for deconvolution. Identification of ionospheric echoes in a received sky wave signal was viewed as a deconvolution problem, and the cepstral transformation was used to obtain information about the multipath profile of the channel. Field tests were carried out where multipath characteristics of the ionospheric channel was measured using this technique.