| abstract |
A system for wind profiling comprises sondes for being borne through the atmosphere by balloons and transmitting signals enabling identifying the sondes, and received by receivers capable of determining the angle of arrival (AOA) of the signals from the sondes, so that they can be tracked. In the preferred embodiment, the signal transmitted by each sonde is a phase-shift-keyed (PSK) signal. The carrier phase difference as measured at two spaced antennas is measured to provide an accurate but ambiguous measure of the difference in distance of the path length between the sonde and receivers, and the symbol phase difference is employed to remove the ambiguity. The difference in path length is then used to determine AOA. Atmospheric data and the sonde identification are encoded using a psuedo-random sequence (PRS) of the PSK symbols. |