IONORT: IONOsphere Ray-Tracing - Ray-tracing program in ionospheric magnetoplasma

TL;DR

IONORT is a versatile ray-tracing program for ionospheric radio propagation, integrating legacy Fortran code with modern MATLAB interface for enhanced usability and visualization.

Contribution

The paper presents a modernized implementation of the ionospheric ray-tracing program IONORT, combining Fortran core with MATLAB interface for improved accessibility and graphical output.

Findings

Efficient integration of Fortran code into MATLAB environment.

Generation of 2D and 3D visualizations on geo-referenced maps.

Enhanced usability for radio propagation studies.

Abstract

The application package "IONORT" for the calculation of ray-tracing can be used by customers using the Windows operating system. It is a program whose interface with the user is created in MATLAB. In fact, the program launches an executable that integrates the system of differential equations written in Fortran and importing the output in the MATLAB program, which generates graphics and other information on the ray. This work is inspired mainly by the program of Jones and Stephenson, widespread in the scientific community that is interested in radio propagation via the ionosphere. The program is written in FORTRAN 77, a mainframe CDC-3800. The code itself, as well as being very elegant, is highly efficient and provides the basis for many programs now in use mainly in the Coordinate Registration (CR) of Over The Horizon (OTH) radars. The input and output of this program require devices no longer in use for several decades and there are no compilers that accept instructions written for that type of mainframe. For this reason, the core of the program to perform numerical integration, after the necessary amendments, was passed to a modern compiler under the Windows operating system and the executable has been imported into a MATLAB program. Thus, all input and output operations are handled by modern MATLAB program that implements the Fortran program and importing the output. This provides great versatility to the entire application package with presentations in two dimensions (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) on real geo-referenced maps.