Abstract: A system, computer program product and method of examining the ionosphere is disclosed. The method includes capturing, at one or more antennas, radio frequency (RF) emissions preceding a broadband emission event. The RF emissions are then recorded at one or more broadband receivers over a period of time. A first tuning of the received RF emissions is selected to detect ionospheric reflections, and a second tuning of the received RF emissions is selected to detect direct line of sight emissions. From the selected tunings, an amplitude or complex time series of the second tuning with one or more channels of the first tuning are correlated to calculate a relative virtual echo height of the ionosphere.

Abstract: A method for automatically identifying the source of fluctuations in a trans-ionospheric radio signal, by acquiring a portion of the radio signal and computing statistics on it, including mean, standard deviation, scintillation index, skew, kurtosis, decorrelation time, and spectral slope. The scintillation index, skew, kurtosis, decorrelation time, and spectral slope are compared to thresholds, and based at least in part upon the comparisons, at least one condition present in the portion of the radio signal is selectively indicated to an operator, where the condition is selected from the group of no signal fluctuations, RF interference, multipath interference, noise, and ionospheric scintillation.