Hycam: A new S band surface radar testbed

In 2008, ONERA started designing, for the French MoD, an S band surface radar testbed in the aim to support studies of new radar architectures. The core idea was to build a “high versatility system” able to collect data representative of most of ongoing radar projects, but also to prepare future developments. Within this context, we have defined and built a system that can address studies such as the use of new waveforms, multi function´s scheduling optimisation, the benefit of using high bandwidths for recognition, the advantage of polarimetry for target or environment identification, beam sharpening, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configurations, etc...The system, named HYCAM, was delivered late 2011 and this paper presents its main features and components.