A team of four ECE seniors has been self-selected and chosen to design and build an open-source aeronomy radar. The team will build up prior work by Juha Vierinen and David Hysell in the area of HF radar used to investigate the ionospheres behavior vs. time.

Their most recent published work involved one transmitter and two receivers. From discussion with Juha, these measurements become far more interesting when numerous measurement nodes are involved in a small geographic area extending perhaps 400x400 km with stations spaced every 50 km or so. This setup give the capability of telecentric “imaging” of the ionosphere at HF. Using offset antennas and dual synchronized receivers, polarization can be detected.