Establishment of ionosphere TEC and scintillation measurement system using radio beacon satellite receiver at Pontianak Indonesia

Characteristics of the ionosphere which is usually represented by Total Electron Content (TEC) is useful for communications, satellite navigation and also aerospace vehicles. The ionopheric scintillation often causes effects on communications with satellites, and also affects GPS performance. A new measurement system developed called a radio beacon satellite receiver to measure ionospheric TEC and scintillation has been implemented in Pontianak (0.003°S, 109.366°E) as part of the ionospheric observation network in equatorial Indonesia. The open source toolkit for software defined radio, namely GNU Radio and an open source hardware, called Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) have been used to develop receiver systems in order to conduct digital signal processing and to receive satellite radio beacons satellite signal of 150 and 400 MHz. The GRBR installation at Pontianak was successful and has been in operation since March 2011. TEC and scintillation data were received and collected, and the results showed a good agreement or much better compared to an analog beacon receiver operated in a similar place. In this paper, the description of the system, the first experimental and application results of the observations at the Pontianak Observatory, including data comparison with an analog beacon receiver is reported.