A comprehensive sounding of the ionospheric HF radio link from Antarctica to Spain

Since 2003, our group has been investigating the performance of different transmission techniques for low-power low-interference High Frequency (HF) ionospheric communication systems. Specifically, we have focused on the link between the Spanish Antarctic Station (SAS) Juan Carlos I in Livingston Island and Ebro Observatory (OE) in Spain, in order to transmit the data gathered from some geomagnetic sensors. These transmission techniques require a valuable knowledge of the channel behavior, thus a comprehensive narrowband and wideband sounding of the ionospheric channel is needed. Some significant improvements both in the system and in the signal processing have been done to achieve this goal. The analysis time and the frequency band have been extended to 24 hours per day and to the whole HF band (2-30 MHz). Moreover, new measurements of the absolute propagation time and the Doppler frequency shift are introduced. In this paper, the sounding results obtained using the new system are presented.