Beacon-assisted quick determination of skywave propagation modes

Determining the propagation modes of high-frequency radar ray within the ionosphere and extracting their corresponding information quickly are quite important for over-the-horizon radar system. In general, the diagnosis to the ionosphere is implemented with special equipments. The equipments, often called ionosondes, have a capability of sounding over the full HF band and the whole illumination area at the price of complexity and time-consuming. When the ionosphere is disturbed drastically, error to estimate ionospheric parameters by ionosondes would be somewhat larger as a result of long processing time. In this paper, a technique for skywave propagation mode determination and parameter estimation has been proposed. Signal transmitted by radar and received by beacons has been used for estimation in the proposed method. The analysis for the dataset collected from an experiment in a short link (∼700km) show that the presented algorithm can offer some ionospheric information quickly, which would be helpful to improve accuracy of tracking and coordinate registration.