Ultra-Wideband Multifunctional Communications/Radar System

We have designed, simulated, fabricated, and tested an ultra-wideband (UWB) multifunctional communication and radar system utilizing a single shared transmitting antenna aperture. Two surface acoustic wave bandpass chirp filters were used to modulate the radar and communications pulses, generating linear frequency modulation waveforms with opposite slope factors. The system operates at a center frequency of 750 MHz with 500 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. The measured range resolution is 63 cm (25 in) using targets with a radar cross section of 2.7 m². The probability of detection was measured to be 99%, and the probability of false alarm was 7% with the communication and radar systems operating simultaneously. The bit error rate for simultaneous communication at 1 Mb/s, and radar at 150 kHz pulse repetition frequency and 1.5-ns pulsewidth is 2e - 3. Our UWB multifunctional system demonstrates the ability to simultaneously interrogate the environment and communicate through a shared transmitting antenna aperture, while realizing a simple system architecture with low output power and not employing time-division multiplexing.