A Direct Localization Method for HF Source Geolocation and Experimental Results

High frequency (HF) geolocation is an important topic in both military and civilian applications. Inaccurate estimation of the ionospheric height will result in nonnegligible locating errors. Based on a multihop HF propagation model, the improved random spatial spectrum method that uses a set of position and height particles is proposed in this letter to estimate the HF transmitter directly from the received I/Q data. To assess the feasibility of the proposed method, experiments are performed, in which different types of HF transmitters are located by five receivers with time synchronization. Simulated and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing two-step HF geolocation algorithms and the relative locating error is less than 3%.