Measurement of Total Electron Content (TEC)
The equipments related to TEC measurements have been imported from GPS Silicon Valley, USA and include an L1/L2 GPS antenna (Novatel’s Model GPS 702), a GPS receiver (Novatel’s Euro Pak 3-M), relevant software and Connecting cables, (www.novatel.com) as shown in following figure. The GPS receiver can locate up to 11 GPS signals at two frequencies of 1575.42 MHz and 1227.6 MHz. It measures phase and amplitude at 50-Hz rate and code/carrier divergence at 1- Hz rate for each satellite being tracked and computes TEC from combined frequencies pseudo range and carrier phase measurements. The primary purpose of the GPS receiver is to collect ionospheric scintillation and TEC data for all visible satellites. The output data contains 4-pairs of TEC and TEC rate values computed every 15 seconds along with real time values of amplitude scintillation index S4 and the phase scintillation index computed over 1-minute.
The experimental set up- GPS Ionospheric Scintillation and TEC Monitoring (GISTM) system