A new location precision model for multi-static over-the-horizon radar system

Abstract

In this paper, a multi-static system working in an active way is made up of ionospheric oblique backscatter sounding system (IOBSS) and two separate receiving stations, which adopts discontinuous wave mechanism. We have advanced a new model that contains skywave condition to locate over-the-horizon targets. We use a single quasi-parabolic (QP) ionosphere model and an analytic ray-tracing program to obtain the coordinate registration (CR) index, which changes skywave group range to ground range. Also, IOBSS and other two receiving stations use this distance information to locate the target which is far away from the system. The analytic expression for the geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) under different station deployments are obtained, which shows GDOP is influenced by the system measurement precision, the stations' coordinates, and CR index. By computer simulation, we find that GDOP of isosceles right triangle deployment is smaller than that of line deployment and location precision will be improved with increasing base line length. The results indicate that this model is practicable with an acceptable range of error (less than 500 m under certain conditions in this paper).

Real-time automatic scaling method of oblique ionogram parameters based on morphological operator and inversion technique

“…Detection of ionosphere with short wave can obtain the ionogram, which describes the relation between radio wave propagation lag and frequency [1][2][3][4] . People extract parameters related to ionosphere from ionogram (such as group path, frequency, and so on) which truly reflect the state of ionosphere, and the process of extracting the feature parameters is called scaling [4,5] .…”