Design And Testing Of An Ionospheric Doppler Receiver

As an important part of the Earth space environment, ionosphere variations have a very important impact on the daily life and activities and living of human beings. Ionosphere disturbance always manifests itself as a complex temporal and spatial variation process. Therefore, to strengthen the real-time monitoring of ionosphere disturbance and study the physical mechanism of the ionosphere disturbance is an important topic of space physics. Software defined radio technology is deployed to design an ionosphere Doppler receiver. Consisting of PXI bus and digital chips including DSP and FPGA, the receiver uses GPS as a module to synchronize time and frequency. Its system parameters can be set flexibly. Receiving high frequency signals from the Shanxi astronomical observatory, the receiver can get real-time ionosphere Doppler shift information caused by ionosphere disturbance. A signal processing software using MATLAB language processes the received high frequency signals. Observations show that the receiver is proved to be an effective means to obtain the ionosphere disturbance information in different spatial scales by data processing since it can analyze the change in Doppler shift of the echo signal of an ionosphere as time changes.