In this paper we consider the theoretical characterization of the ionospheric transmission. More accurately, we derive a closed form expression of the average capacity for Mid-latitude High Frequency (HF) ionospheric channels. Heretofore, this problem has been studied for Rayleigh channels when each tap of the impulse response has a Rayleigh distribution without characterizing the variance of this distribution. In this paper, we extend these works to HF ionospheric channels by evaluating the variance of the amplitude attenuation versus the Doppler spread and then the channel capacity. For a multipath HF ionospheric channel, we model the Doppler phenomenon as a Gaussian profile which is suggested for HF environments. Finally, we derive a closed form expression of the average channel capacity using the probability density function (pdf) of the instantaneous impulse response. Numerical results on both simulated and real measured data are derived at the end of the paper.