The paper presents the findings of the research performed with the use of a new universal ionosonde. Its multipurposeness is manifested in the sounding method used (oblique-incidence and vertical-incidence) as well as in the spread spectrum (SS) signals used (BPSK, FMCW and FMICW). The ionosonde was developed using SDR technology with transceiver platform USRP N210. The paper also discusses the features of signals of various shapes providing extra energy with a minimum transmission power and single antenna in the vertical-incidence sounding (VIS) mode. The algorithms for extracting a sounding signal from the background noise are presented. The algorithms of estimating current channel parameters were developed for determining channel state. They were used to estimate the availability of various separate channels. It was experimentally found that the diagnostics of the key parameters of a channel (delay and Doppler spread, SNR) allows to decrease the transmission power by 5 ... 10 dB with a constant data transfer rate, or to increase the transfer rate up to twice with a constant transmission power.