Radar Signals

Tutorial I: Radar Introduction and basic concepts

Outline
Introduction to radar
Radar history
Radar principles
Radar category

Two important concepts

Doppler effect
Matched filter
 Radar history
First radar test (1904)
German high frequency engineer Christian Hulsmeyer
Traffic supervision on water: he measures the running
time of electro-magnetic waves to a metal ship and back

An aircraft was first located by radar in 1930

Lawrence A. Hyland (Naval Research Lab)

Radar development underwent a strong push during

World War II
Radar principles
A radar does nothing but measures the round-
trip time delay the range R = c t / 2

radar: radio detection and ranging

 The radar beam can be focused to a specific
direction azimuth and elevation

Mechanical rotation /
phased-array

Radars work in high frequencies

High resolution (small wavelength small object)
Small antenna size
 Frequency ranges
GHz

Airborne radar
(small size, shirt range,
high resolution)

Over the horizon

(high power, low
resolution)
 The radar equation
received power (w)
transmitted power (w)
antenna gain

effective antenna aperture (m2)

radar cross section (m2)
Range ambiguity
The radar time is set to zero each time a pulse is
transmitted
If echo signals from the first pulse arrive after
the second pulse transmission, ambiguity arises

Maximum unambiguous range

Range resolution

Without intra-pulse modulation

is the pulse width

With intra-pulse modulation and range

compression
is the bandwidth of the pulse
very small resolution
100 MHz 1.5 m
Angular resolution
High directivity of radar antennas small
beam width small resolution
Classification of radar systems
Doppler effect

( )
Taylor expansion:
 What if wideband signals?

We cannot simply inverse T

The received signal is a time-scaled and delayed
version of the transmitted signal:

envelop of the signal affected

If bandwidth < 0.1 carrier frequency, it is reasonable

to assume that the motion causes only a Doppler
shift to the carrier frequency.
Complex representation of signals
Majority are narrow bandpass signals
 Matched filter
Probability of detection is more related to SNR rather
than the exact shape of the waveform
A matched filter maximizes SNR at the output of the filter
Equality holds if and only if

Matched filter output:

Auto-correlation function
 The matched filter
Its impulse response is linearly related to the time-
inverted complex-conjugate signal
When the input to the matched filter is the correct
signal plus white noise, the peak output is linearly
related to the signal's energy.
At the peak output, the SNR is the highest attainable,
which is 2E / N0
The response is described by the autocorrelation
function of the signal
MF response to Doppler-shifted signals

Ambiguity function

The AF describes the output of a matched filter when the input

signal is delayed by tau and Doppler shifted by nu relative to
nominal values for which the matched filter was designed.
To be continued...
Ambiguity function
Various properties

Basic radar signals

Constant frequency pulse
Linear-frequency modulated pulse
A train of pulses

Thank you
Sep. 2009