Experimental consideration on the synthetic range-profile processing by stepped-frequency radar

In radar system, separation of the target from the background clutters requires high range and cross-range resolution. To improve the range resolution, shorter pulses and wideband-FM pulses are utilized. However, they tend to complicate system architecture and to increase implementation cost due to the necessity of a wideband receiver. The synthetic range-profile (SRP) processing has been proposed to realize high range resolution without using the wideband receiver. The principle of the processing is that the echoes of stepped-frequency pulses are synthesized by IDFT in the frequency domain. This enables us to obtain short pulses in the time domain. This paper proposes the SRP radar composed of high-speed wideband exciter, which generates the stepped-frequency pulses. Through experiments, effectiveness of the proposed system is verified.