An Antarctica‐to‐Spain HF ionospheric radio link: Sounding results

Abstract

Our research group in Electromagnetism and Communications is involved in a project dealing with the channel characterization of an ionospheric radio link from the Spanish Antarctic Base (62.6°S, 60.4°W) to the Observatori de l'Ebre (40.8°N, 0.5°E) in Spain. Since the link was established for the first time on December 2003, the sounder and measurement techniques have been improved on the basis of the preliminary results. In this paper, the final results of the project corresponding to the 2006/2007 sounding survey are presented. First the hardware and measurement techniques used to probe the channel are described. Then the results in terms of channel availability (and its daily, hourly, and frequency variation), multipath and Doppler spreads, and signal‐to‐noise ratio are discussed. These results are being used to design the physical layer of a low data rate transmission system intended to send the information acquired by a geomagnetic sensor in the Antarctica