Design and Application of the Distributed Ionospheric Coherent Scatter Radar

In this letter, a newly designed distributed coherent scatter radar for localization of ionospheric irregularities is presented. It is composed of a detection network that can detect ionospheric irregularities with the help of a time synchronization module. To achieve a fairly narrow beam with high directive gain, an antenna array is used in this transmitter module. The frequency band is from high frequency (HF) to very HF to detect irregularities at different scales. In addition, the radar uses a universal serial bus to reduce its size, which allows it to be easily moved to different areas. An iterative ray tracing method is also applied to localize the ionospheric irregularities. The results indicate that the radar can effectively track ionospheric irregularity in 3-D space.

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