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IONIS Model

IONIS (Ionospheric Neural Inference System) predicts HF radio signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for any transmitter-receiver path. One model, one forward pass, six mode-aware operational verdicts — from WSPR at -28 dB to SSB at +5 dB.

Current Production: IONIS V22-gamma + PhysicsOverrideLayer

Metric Value
Architecture IonisGate (205,621 parameters) + PhysicsOverrideLayer
Pearson correlation +0.492
RMSE 0.821σ (~5.5 dB)
KI7MT operator tests 17/17 PASS
TST-900 band x time 9/11
Checkpoint safetensors (805 KB)

Trained on 20M WSPR + 4.55M DXpedition (50x) + 6.34M Contest signatures (~31M rows) on Mac Studio M3 Ultra. PhysicsOverrideLayer adds deterministic post-inference clamping for high-band night closure.

Architecture

IonisGate separates geography from physics by design:

  • Trunk DNN: 15 geography/time features through 512 - 256 - 128 - 1
  • Sun Sidecar: SFI (solar flux) through a monotonic MLP — higher SFI always helps
  • Storm Sidecar: Kp (geomagnetic) through a monotonic MLP — storms always hurt
  • Gated mixing: Trunk-derived gates scale sidecar contributions by geography

The "Nuclear Option" — the trunk receives zero direct solar information. All physics flows through constrained sidecars that cannot violate ionospheric law.

Read more: IonisGate Architecture | Monotonic Sidecars

Methodology

The training pipeline transforms 14B+ raw radio observations into model-ready signatures through a medallion architecture:

  • Bronze: Raw ingest from WSPR, RBN, contest logs, PSK Reporter
  • Silver: CUDA-accelerated embeddings with solar enrichment
  • Gold: Aggregated signatures — grid-pair, band, time, solar, SNR

Read more: Data Pipeline | Training

Validation

V22-gamma is validated against multiple independent benchmarks:

  1. KI7MT operator-grounded tests — 17/17 hard pass (18 tests from 49K QSOs + 5.7M contest signatures)
  2. TST-900 band x time discrimination — 9/11 across all HF bands and time periods
  3. PhysicsOverrideLayer verification — deterministic clamp fires on high-band night paths

V20 historical validation (VOACAP comparison, PSK Reporter acid test) provides the foundation that V22-gamma inherits and improves upon.

Read more: Validation Overview | Link Budget Battery