Future Concepts for Wideband Antenna Radar Systems

Array based radar sensing systems are set to become the norm in future systems. Current array based systems tend to operate at the sub-array level often condensing the received echo information into one or two channels only. Processing of the received data is often relatively simple with a few fixed modes of operation. Future trends are largely two-fold. Firstly there is a move from a small number of sub-arrays towards operation at the element level and second there are more output channels available for more sophisticated processing. Wideband arrays are increasingly necessary to support more demanding modes of operation required for capability such as target classification. This requires bandwidths of the order of 2-4GHz around a centre frequency of 10GHz. Examples will be given of methods used to synthesise such bandwidths, thus avoiding the limitations of array techniques and of the resulting target signatures and classification performance.