Design and performance assessment of an airborne ice sounding radar front-end

The paper describes the design and experimental performance assessment of the RF front-end of an airborne P-band ice sounding radar. The ice sounder design features newly developed components at a centre frequency of 435 MHz, such as, antenna 20% bandwidth at RL < 13 dB, compact high power in-phase and out-of-phase power dividers with a relative bandwidth of 20% and more than 75 W CW power handling, high power SPDT PIN switch with 90 W CW power handling and a 70 W CW high efficiency LDMOS power amplifier with >60% power-added efficiency. The system comprises also a digital signal generator, a digital front-end and a control unit. The system was functionally tested in March 2008 and had a first successful proof-of-concept campaign in Greenland in May 2008.