Interfacing and off-line analysis for VOS-1A Barry ionosonde

Abstract

Ionospheric studies have a great importance in radiopropagation and planetary atmospheric physics. The basic instrument for the investigation of ionospheric physics is the sweep frequency H-F radar called ionosonde. Ionospheric measurements, like other geophysical quantities, are useful only if there is a long and unbroken history, both for scientific and service purposes. Therefore a huge amount of data is produced and only a few ionospheric characteristics are scaled. In the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica, the ionospheric hard copy data bank (paper and film) already requires a large storage space. The rough data on hard copy are not suitable for complete analysis and they should be completely digitized before processing. Usually only some characteristics are digitized and stored (scaled ionogram), but in this way it becomes more difficult to extract important physical quantities like the electron density profile. In order to overcome these problems, an Ionospheric Data Acquisition System (IDAS) based on commercial PCs has been developed. This ensures reliability for data acquisition and the availability of commercial software packages for analysis, compression and storage.