Development of an airborne ice sounding radar front-end

This paper describes the design of an airborne P-band ice sounding radar. The ice sounder design features a microstrip antenna array with a relative operating bandwidth of 20%, compact RF components, a high efficiency high-power LDMOS power amplifier with >60% power-added efficiency across a relative bandwidth of 20% at a center frequency of 435 MHz, and a digital signal generation and acquisition unit. Furthermore, we demonstrate broadband performance of our left-handed/right-handed out-of-phase power dividers. In 2008 the first data acquisition campaign will take place in Greenland.