A phased array antenna system has at least one trough reflector, each trough reflector having at least one phased array located at a feed point of the reflector, and an array of elements located near to a point equal to one half of a center transmission wavelength. A method of decoding a receive signal includes propagating a transmit signal through a transmit and a receive path of a phased array to generate a coupled signal, digitizing the coupled signal, storing the digitized coupled signal, receiving a signal from a target, and using the digitized coupled signal to decode the signal from the target. A method of modeling the ionosphere includes transmitting measuring pulses from an incoherent scattering radar transmitter, receiving incoherent scatter from the transmitting, and analyzing the incoherent scatter to determine pulse and amplitude of the incoherent scatter to profile electron number density of the ionosphere.