Enabling ionospheric tomography with downlink to TM/TC station in the Czech Republic

Ionospheric tomography demonstrated by the CITRIS receiver on the STPSat-1 using C/NOFS CERTO radio beacon traversing ionospheric topside with benefit of short transceiver-receiver distance resolved local inhomogeneities of few metres with 1 TECU and 10 Hz S4 sampling. SpaceBuoy followed, but topside scintillation is currently not monitored by any operational spacecraft.

Cubesats with tomographic receivers at LEO also take advantage of higher ratio of the radio frequencies used for comparison, specifically 5.1 from over 50 DORIS globally distributed terrestrial beacons and 2.6 from the other LEO satellites, e.g. COSMIC, compared to use of GPS signals with its ratio 1.3 only.
Satellite rapid sampling may help understanding the ionospheric disturbances induced by Alfvén-waves, therefore the burst data downlink is needed for post-processing. The delay of data downlink to the ground station also limits whether the products would be considered useful for monitoring purposes, i.e. provided in near-real time.

To support cooperation in ionospheric monitoring and research the cubesat reception using helical UHF, parabolic 10m S-band or fast steering 6/4m X- or S-band antennas can be performed at the TM/TC station Panska Ves.

For terrestrial monitoring of ionospheric disturbances the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences operates Digisonde DPS-4D at Pruhonice ionospheric observatory as well as dedicated HF Continuous Doppler Sounding Systems (CDSS) of the IAP installed in the western part of the Czech Republic. Similar networks (CDSS co-located with the Digisondes) have been set in operation by the IAP also in the South Africa, Argentina and Taiwan.