Preliminary measurements of the wideband HF groundwave channel

An experiment was conducted to measure key parameters of the wideband groundwave propagation channel over a nominal instantaneous bandwidth, of 1 MHz. The experiment was conducted to measure the time dispersion induced by the channel, to compare the path loss for wideband signals versus narrowband signals, and to gain a better understanding of the noise and interference environment for the groundwave HF channel. Based on the experiments performed, it was concluded that the channel does not impose any bandwidth limitations on wideband HF signals, and the path loss is the same for both wideband and narrowband HF signals