Transmission of radio wave pulse through an isotropic ionosphere

To describe the characteristics of a signal pulse and channel model for a radio wave communication through ionosphere, different electron density profiles for the ionospheric layer have been proposed earlier. In most cases the electron density variation was assumed to be abrupt. In this paper we consider a more general sech2 profile for a horizontally stratified ionosphere. This profile allows completely analytic treatment, and hence we obtain expressions for transmission distance and rise time of a pulse propagating through ionosphere. The result shows that rise time can be a real measure of the degree of distortion of the received pulses.