Event Identification and Recording for Scintillation Monitoring Stations

Abstract

This paper presents the development and deployment of a network of GNSS-based ionosphere monitoring stations. To simultaneously satisfy the requirements of traditional ionosphere monitoring via scintillation indices; and to support the collection of digital IF samples, suitable for atmospheric research and receiver development, a custom software-defined radio platform has been developed. Owing to the high data throughput associated with the collection of IF data various means of reducing the storage requirements are explored. These include the tradeoff between both IF bandwidth and digitizer resolution and the associate fidelity of scintillation measurements; the real-time identification of scintillation events, whereby only those recordings of short periods of interest are archived. The process is considered as three distinct tasks, those of: data acquisition, run-time event identification, and post-mission event analysis. The design, configuration and run-time calibration of the data acquisition unit are discussed; a heuristic event detection method, based on a software-defined GNSS receiver is described and preliminary results obtained from some scintillation event analysis are presented.