Digital signal processing and numerical analysis for radar in geophysical applications Original Research Article

Numerical solutions for signal processing are described in this work as a contribution to study of echo detection methods for ionospheric sounder design. The ionospheric sounder is a high frequency radar for geophysical applications. The main detection approach has been done by implementing the spread-spectrum techniques using coding methods to improve the radar’s range resolution by transmitting low power. Digital signal processing has been performed and the numerical methods were checked. An algorithm was proposed and its computational complexity was calculated. The proposed detection process combines two channels correlations with the local code and calculates threshold (Vt) by statistical evaluation of the background noise to design a detection algorithm. The noisy signals treatment was performed depending on the threshold and echo amplitude. In each case, the detection was improved by using coherent integration. Synthetic signals, close loop and actual echoes, obtained from the Advanced Ionospheric Sounder (AIS-INGV) at Rome Ionospheric Observatory, were used to verify the process. The results showed that, even in highly noisy environments, the echo detection is possible. Given that these are preliminary results, further studies considering data sets corresponding to other geophysical conditions are needed.