Digital signal processing for ionospheric propagation diagnostics

Abstract

For decades, analog beacon satellite receivers have generated multifrequency narrowband complex data streams that could be processed directly to extract total electron content (TEC) and scintillation diagnostics. With the advent of software-defined radio, modern digital receivers generate baseband complex data streams that require intermediate processing to extract the narrowband modulation imparted to the signal by ionospheric structure. This paper develops and demonstrates a processing algorithm for digital beacon satellite data that will extract TEC and scintillation components. For algorithm evaluation, a simulator was developed to generate noise-limited multifrequency complex digital signal realizations with representative orbital dynamics and propagation disturbances. A frequency-tracking procedure is used to capture the slowly changing frequency component. Dynamic demodulation against the low-frequency estimate captures the scintillation. The low-frequency reference can be used directly for dual-frequency TEC estimation.