Design and Development of the Ionospheric Recording Stations within the H037-MoNEWIC/eMONITOR Project

Abstract

Since its establishment by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2010 and through its second and third iterations in 2014 and 2019 when it was continued by the EU, the aim of the MONITOR project has been to achieve a better understanding of the ionospheric variability and its impacts on the performance of the GNSS signals through the design, development and deployment of a network of ionospheric stations. In this scope, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has been involved in designing and setting up five Ionospheric Recording Stations (IRS) at low and high latitudes, namely at the Andøya Space Center at Andøya (Norway) and the Arctic University of Norway at Tromsø (Norway), and via close collaboration with Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) to host institutions at the ICTP-East African Institute for Fundamental Research in Kigali (Rwanda), at the the University Félix Houphouët-Boigny in San Pedro (Côte d'Ivoire) and the Center of Atmospheric Research in Abuja (Nigeria). The core component of each of these stations is the PolaRx5S high rate GNSS receiver from Septentrio, capable of generating 50 Hz GNSS raw data and further processing ionospheric parameters such as the amplitude and phase scintillation indices S4 and SigmaPhi. In addition, three out of the five stations will be equipped with an ECHO-R bitgrabber from Syntony. This system has been designed to record the GNSS frequencies L1 and L5 with a 10 MHz bandwidth and to be triggered based on S4 levels, thus allowing recorded data streams during scintillation events to be used as test scenarios for receivers or to be manually processed to further investigate ionospheric scintillation phenomena and mitigate their impact on the quality of GNSS signals. Furthermore, the IRS uses a set of data collectors and processors that have been developed to process the raw GNSS data into ASCII files such as RINEX and SCINTEX based on tools provided by the receiver manufacturer. For the purposes of monitoring and alerting, open source technologies have also been set up and configured to continuously monitor key system components and send automatic alerts to the IRS operators. This contribution will present the design and configuration of the IRS and its instrumentation and also describe the software components developed to ensure its operation.