Chirp Sounding and HF Application : SDR Technology Implementation

Abstract: From a HF propagation point of view, the ionospheric layers act as partially conducting media (plasma) in which a transmitted radio wave can reflect upon.A way of determining whether a radio wave with a given frequency will reflect from the ionosphere or completely penetrate is to utilize special radar instruments know as ionosondes or chirp sounders. The technique is widely used by amateur enthusiasts and military radio users for monitoring available radio channel links between two remote locations and can often serve as a base for HF radio prognoses.The objective of this Bachelor’s Thesis was to explore, implement and test a single channel receiver for monitoring ionospheric sounders. The implementation is based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology and relies on the GNU Chirp Sounder (gcs) open source script program.