Performance investigation of a highly digitized radar at X-band

Kurzfassung

The performance of a highly digitized radar system called “GigaRad” was investigated. The GigaRad system is a new concept for a highly- digitized radar instrument to reduce the amount of analogue components to a minimum. A prototype was built in a previous work and has two key functioning elements: a high speed analogue to digital converter and an arbitrary waveform generator. The high sampling frequency of both elements enables the transmission and reception of wideband signals. In this work, the experimental prototype of the GigaRad system was expanded from one to two transmitter channels, each one fed by an orthogonal radar signal. Since the behaviour of the transmitted signals affects the resolution in the range direction of the system, a careful waveform design and performance study was done. The autocorrelation and cross-correlation properties of different radar waveforms known from the literature were studied and verified with ISAR measurements.