Engineering Commons^™

A Total Electron Content Receiver For The E-Pop Mission, Dmitry Shatskiy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Ionospheric parameters, such as electron density have a highly irregular structure and vary greatly throughout the day and with the seasons. Complete knowledge of the ionospheric structure usually requires expensive and/or stationary equipment such as rocket probes or incoherent scatter radars.

A height-integrated electron density along the satellite – ground-based receiver path, called total electron content (TEC), is often used as a measure of ionospheric inhomogeneities and, when possible, for ionospheric tomography.

An inexpensive portable digital receiver was used to assess the background ionospheric TEC. GNU Radio, an open-source software radio toolkit, GNU/Linux Bash scripts, a code in Python, a …