RaTS, a system for ionospheric ray tracing

Abstract

This paper presents a system for ionospheric ray tracing and shows examples of some usual propagation effects calculated with the system. Ray tracing or better known as geometrical optics, is an essential method to study the propagation of ionospheric radio signals. Besides the ray path itself, several propagation characteristics such as signal intensity, polarisation, time of flight, phase, Doppler shifts and effects of large scale inhomogeneities can be calculated. RaTS is an acronym for Ray Tracing System, where the word system emphasizes that it is a program which is a combination of several separate modules. The program is written in C++ in an object oriented manner, which makes it possible to change integration methods, electron density models, collision frequency models, magnetic field models and calculation type at run time without loss of performance. The program is a complete system with a, graphical user interface (GUI) and graphical presentation of the result of the calculations. >