Analysis on characteristics of ionospheric sidescatter propagation

The sidescatter sounding technique is a new ionospheric sounding technique developed in recent years. To obtain the ionospheric state information in the sounding area based on the ionospheric sidescatter sounding results, the indepth analysis of the ionospheric sidescatter propagation characteristics is needed. In this paper, the signaltonoise(SNR) equation of coming signal is derived in detail, and using the threedimensional ray tracing technique, the sidescatter ionograms under different receiving beams are simulated. The variations of the parameters, such as, the minimum delay line, the maximum usable frequency(MUF) of different ground distance, are also presented.