A neural network approach to the extraction of 1hop F-layer traces from oblique-incidence ionograms is shown to offer performance at least comparable with conventional filtering techniques. Preprocessing in the form of background noise and vertical (horizontal) line removal is utilised prior to training a 110∶7∶100 MLP using backpropagation with momentum. It is further demonstrated that such successful trace extraction can be achieved with just 50 ionogram training exemplars.