A propagation model for the mid and high latitude ionosphere over Europe

The management of beyond line of sight HF communications depends critically on effective modelling of the ionosphere together with accurate ray tracing through it. As part of an automatic frequency management system a portable package is being developed to determine the propagation footprint of HF radio waves. The package can also be used to improve the performance of HF single site location and direction finding techniques. The package was broken up into three main sections of development, namely ionospheric specification, propagation determination and the combining of these two to provide the final HF communication model. More details of these requirements and how they are related to each other is given.