Procedures to improve the performances of a Sfcw radar used for landmine detection

In the last decades a lot of research has been done to develop different types of ground penetrating radars to be used for antipersonnel landmine detection, archaeological investigations, search for underground pipes etc. They have to provide a resolution comparable with the dimension of the smallest landmine and the needed penetration for each application. To comply with high resolution requirement a ultra wide band system is required and it can be manufactured to work either in time domain or in frequency domain. In this paper two procedures to improve downrange and cross range resolution of stepped frequency continuous wave (SFCW) radar are described. The two procedures are applied to experimental data collected with SFCW radar and the improvements in the radar performances are described in the paper.