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A digital low power pulse compressed ionosonde was developed at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia
 (INGV), Rome, Italy. The aim of this Advanced Ionospheric Sounder, AIS-INGV, is to reduce the transmitted
 power and, consequently, weight, size, power consumption and hardware complexity. To compensate the
 power reduction the most advanced HF radar techniques such as the pulse compression and a phase coherent integration
 are used. The ionosonde is completely programmable and a PC supports the data acquisition, control, storage
 and on-line processing. The first prototype was installed at Gibilmanna Ionospheric Observatory (Sicily), an
 interesting location in the center of Mediterranean area. The new ionosonde will contribute to ionospheric database
 and real time knowledge of South European ionospheric conditions for space weather applications. In this work the
 first results (ionograms and autoscaled characteristics) are presented and briefly discussed.