Design and Development of A FMCW Ground Based Imaging Radar System

This paper describes the design and development of a ground based Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar system in Multimedia Univeristy (MMU), Malaysia. In this project, a ground-based fully polarometric, C-band, high bandwidth linear FM-CW and real time imaging radar system is to be designed and constructed. The system should have the capability to measure the complex scattering matrices of distributed targets using FMCW system and obtained fully polarimetric signals which can be used to provide more accurate identiflcation and classiflcation of the geophysical media. The purposed system hardware consists of four major sections: an antenna system, a radio frequency (RF) subsystem, an intermediate frequency (IF) electronic, and a data acquisition unit (DAU). The RF section is constructed in-house from several RF components, which include voltage-controlled oscillator, high power amplifler, directional coupler, RF switches, band-pass fllter, isolators, and mixers. In RF section, the received signal is mixed with a portion of the transmitted signal to produce low frequency IF signals. The IF signals are pre-processed in IF section, before they are digitised in DAU. A mobile personnel computer with analog to digital converter card is used to store the measurement data and process the data on real time basics. In paper, the high level design will be discussed and detail design parameters will be presented. It followed by radar electronics design, which outlined the detail in radar transmitter and receiver.