Monitoring Ionosphere over Antarctica by means of a GNSS Signal Acquisition System and a Software Radio Receiver

The Earth’s upper atmosphere presents a region particularly rich of free electrons, the ionosphere. Such high concentration makes the ionosphere the major natural contributor to the degraded quality of the GNSS signals received at ground. In polar regions, such as in Antarctica, this degradation can be stronger, creating serious problems in using GNSS devices for logistic and scientific purposes. An ionosphere monitoring station, based on a GNSS signal acquisition system and on a software radio receiver, has been installed in two research stations in Antarctica, in the frame of the DemoGRAPE project. The full system is not only able to monitor TEC and scintillation activity in GPS L1 C/A and L2C signals, but also to grab and store raw unprocessed samples for post-processing analysis by means of software radio techniques. This paper presents the description of the setup and of the installation of the system as well as a report of the first results obtained by processing the data acquired during the first week of operation.