Electron Density Profile

The measurements of the earth’s ionosphere are extremely important for understanding the electrodynamics, plasma instabilities and more importantly for the contemporary interest to study the space weather. Local time and seasonal variability of the electron density is extremely important for academics well as practical purposes with applications to satellite communication and navigation, development of equatorial ionosphere model and its applications to remote sensing. This configuration supports to carry out experiments in SA, SDI, IDI, TDI, PBS, and Imaging modes. The smallest and the longest base line lengths available are 8m and 270m respectively. The RF front-end units will be placed in an enclosure located in the antenna field. The direct digital receivers with dedicated primary data recorders will be located in the instrumentation. The conventional tools to measure electron density profile are rocket probes and incoherent scatter radar. The project being developed at NARL is based on the property of the propagation of the electromagnetic wave in an ionized medium

The Faraday rotation of the plane polarized wave traveling through the ionized medium is proportional to electron density. In this project, it is proposed to estimate the electron density profile using the coherent.