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

Abstract

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.