Experimental Demonstration for Ionospheric Sensing and Aircraft Detection With a HF Skywave Multistatic Radar

In this letter, a new high-frequency (HF) skywave multistatic radar that is used for ionospheric sensing and aircraft detection is presented. With multiple receiving sites, this radar can detect the aircraft in much larger surveillance with high probability and can obtain the characteristics of many ionospheric paths simultaneously. In addition, this radar adopts a binary-phase-coded continuous waveform to achieve a high Doppler resolution, a large signal processing gain, and a low probability of interception. Details of the system configuration, the ambiguity function of the sounding waveform, and the signal processing algorithm are described. The experimental results show that backscatter ionograms and oblique ionograms can be simultaneously obtained and that the aircraft with different flying conditions can be clearly detected with an HF skywave multistatic experimental radar.