Photonic based marine radar demonstrator

This paper presents the results obtained during the field trial experiments of the first photonic-based radar system demonstrator, in a real maritime environment. The developed demonstrator exploits photonic technologies for both the generation and the detection of radar RF signals, allowing increased performance even in term of system flexibility. The photonic radar performance have been compared with a state of the art commercial system for maritime applications provided by GEM elettronica resorting to ad-hoc laboratory tests which show comparable results in term of pre and post detection capability. Moreover, to further validate the effectiveness of the implemented architecture, comparison trials of the two radar systems have also been presented in an operative scenario with non cooperative targets in the area of San Bendetto del Tronto port (Italy).