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RATS stand for Radio-Amateur Topside Sounder and it will be the scientific payload for the SkyWave mission.
IT will replicate (upgrading when possible and/or required) the swept-frequency portion of the ISIS Topside Sounder.

The mission is designed to study Ionosphere behaviour using a special radar technique from above the ionosphere maximum altitude. Of course this represents a very challenging target for radio amateurs since the design and implementation of a HF radar was not achieved before in the radio amateur community.

Our effort on design and development of RATS basic functions started from the master RF signal generator. We choose a new approach, using Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) techniques to generate, control and command the carrier frequency necessary for sounding. With this approach, we intend to make reliable and very precise and stable signals to transmit and receive blocks of sounding impulses.

Our effort was primarily devoted to verify feasibility of simple circuits for transmitter part, and next to apply same parts to receiver.

To test our ideas we have designed and built a first single, simple board; a single DDS chip was used, to generate a carrier from 0.1 and 20 MHz.
With our boards, we have a step-sweeping capability (change of DDS frequency in discrete step) with some time limitations (max speed for frequency programming) so a new chip was selected in order to obtain more linear performance.