T01 — Introduction to digital radar

Modern radars have evolved greatly from their origins as providers of blips and blobs to highly trained operators in darkened rooms. Today, all-weather, day and night radars provide clear digital images as detailed and useful as photographs. They also provide digital symbolic representations of multiple types of air, sea, and ground moving targets over wide geographic regions. Today´s state-of-the-art radars can even provide flexible, on-demand sensing services to a large network of users. This tutorial will introduce the student to the concepts, physics, and digital technology underpinning modern coherent radars. The first part of this tutorial will functionally decompose the adaptive agile electronically scanned array radar, and explain how it detects and images objects in its field of view. The second part of the tutorial will describe how radars estimate and predict the behavior of those objects. Prerequisites: students should have a good basic understanding of algebra and geometry. Knowledge of undergraduate electromagnetic field theory, calculus, discrete mathematics, and probability theory would be helpful but are not required.