Design of the transceiver for a new type HF/VHF ionospheric sounding system

Abstract

The Wuhan Ionospheric Sounding System (WISS), based on FPGA and DDS architecture with USB communication, was developed for studying the ionosphere by the Ionospheric Laboratory of Wuhan University. This letter presents an improved hardware system of WISS, which is based on network port communication and suitable for software defined radio. The output waveforms are more controllable and more diversified in the improved system than the previous version. The new version of ionospheric sounding system can not only conduct conventional ionospheric exploration, but also implement meteors sounding by VHF band. The system structure and the design scheme of each module are described in detail. Then, some typical experiment results are carried out to verify the performance of the improved system. Results show that the new version system performed well in the experiments of ionospheric meteors sounding.