An Operational HF System for Single Site Localization

This paper presents an operational HF (3-30MHz) system designed for single site localization (SSL) of transmitters involved in trans horizon radio links. It associates the estimation of the directions of arrival of incident radio waves refracted by the ionosphere with a ray tracing software based on the PRIME model of the channel. The direction finding processing is implemented on an array of non identical sensors that presents a polarization sensitivity. A specific version of the MUSIC algorithm jointly estimates the angles of arrival (azimuth and elevation) of incident waves and their polarization. Statistics of the angles of arrival (mean values and standard deviation) are the input data of a ray tracing software based on the PRIME model of the ionosphere which computes the estimated position of the transmitter. Numerous radio links have been tested for long distances up to 2000 km. A very good agreement is observed between the exact and the estimated positions of the transmitters with a standard localization error being less than 10% of the distance to the receiving system.