Chaotic Coding for Interference Suppression of Digital Ionosonde

External interference in ionospheric sounding seriously degrades the quality of echo signals and data; thus, it should be eliminated. This paper presents a method for suppressing interference using chaotic coding with a set of Bernoulli map sequences; compared with other commonly used coding methods such as Barker code, complementary code, and Barker-like codes, through simulation, the ambiguity function (AF) of Bernoulli map codes has better performance in terms of peak sidelobe level (PSL), integral sidelobe ratio (ISL), noise suppression (NS), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Experimental tests were performed using a vertical ionosonde in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China, and the ionosonde was operated by alternating 40-bit Barker-like coding and 40-bit Bernoulli map coding each day to compare the effectiveness of interference suppression. The results showed that using Bernoulli map coding could remove interference and improve SNR significantly, thereby improving the data quality of the resulting ionograms.