Despite starting nearly 100 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the ionosphere plays an active role in our day-to-day lives in the form of High-Frequency (HF) Radio propagation (McNamara, 1991; Kelly, 2011). International air traffic controllers, oceanographers using surface wave radars, the space launch community, and many others are all affected by electron density distribution in the ionosphere. The ionosphere lets you hear distant AM radio stations in your car but it can also affect the quality of long-range air traffic control.

Modeling the impacts of the ionosphere on HF Radio can be a significant challenge. Installing and operating ionospheric bottomside sounding systems, called ionosondes, requires a large amount of electricity, human resources, and the construction of an entire infrastructure of high-profile antennas. However, passively receiving a characterized or non-characterized sounder transmission is considerably more convenient. It requires a fraction of the power and resources, and utilizes lower-profile equipment that can be installed temporarily.

To do so, IARPA’s High Frequency Geolocation Program (HFGeo) presents the Passive Ionospheric Non-characterized Sounding (PINS) Prize Challenge, an open innovation competition that asks Solvers to develop an algorithm that characterizes, monitors, and models ionospheric variation effects on high frequency emissions.

Solvers are challenged to characterize the ionosphere with selected digitized radio-frequency (RF) spectrum recordings from sounder receiver data, but not any transmitter data. The PINS Challenge is an open data science challenge that will take place in two stages: Explorer and Master. Part I, the Explorer Challenge, will specify the sounder signals to be identified and processed. Part II, the Master Challenge, will add new data sets along the way. Read more challenge details below!