Desing of a low resolution FMCW radar for small target detection under ground clutter

In this paper, the design, analysis and test results of a 24 GHz FMCW radar for small RCS target detection under the ground clutter environment are presented. The radar system is composed of a 24 GHz FMCW radar transceiver, a microcontroller unit (MCU) and a signal processing PC server. We designed a VCO based FMCW radar controlled by the MCU to be cost effective system. The 24 GHz of ISM band was divided into 3 different channels (BW = 75 MHz) to avoid interference at the same site. In signal processing part, four algorithms (Averaging, Correlation 1, Correlation 2, Ordering & Selection) were compared and weighting function of standard deviation was used to increase small RCS target detection probability. Experimental results show that the proposed system can detect small RCS of human targets (RCS ≈ 0.5 m²) up to 100 m.