Wide-bandwidth mobile radar for ISAR/SAR radar imaging

Thorn EMI Electronics Limited (TEE) have been involved in radar signature measurements for the past thirty-five years at Wells in Somerset. Since 1979, the Full-scale Trials Group (FST) have designed and developed mobile radar systems for full-scale dynamic measurements of military platforms in land, sea or air environments. The latest mobile radar systems use a wide instantaneous bandwidth with digitally generated modulation waveforms. Currently, the radars operate at 3 GHz, 10 GHz and 16 GHz, with an instantaneous bandwidth of 500 MHz at each RF band. The radar systems use high stability local oscillators for long-term phase accuracy. The digital waveforms are generated by in-house designed digital processor systems (DPSs). The DPS uses high-speed logic with 8-bit 500 MHz ADCs; real-time hardware correlators are also used to give digital compression for online monitoring. The I and Q components of the raw radar data are recorded with radar `housekeeping´ directly to an Ampex DCRSi video cassette recorder. The radar systems have dual channels (co and cross-polar), with 1024 and 4096 contiguous 0.3 m range cells with a range resolution of 0.36 m. The radars can be used for radar cross section (RCS) measurements where RCS linear or polar plots are available, plus synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging with post processing