Design of Wireless Automatic Synchronization for the Low-Frequency Coded Ground Penetrating Radar

Zhenghuan Xia,Hejun Yin,Shengbo Ye,Zhiwu Xu,Qunying Zhang,Jie Chen,Guangyou Fang

doi:10.1155/2015/864153

Abstract

Low-frequency coded ground penetrating radar (GPR) with a pair of wire dipole antennas has some advantages for deep detection. Due to the large distance between the two antennas, the synchronization design is a major challenge of implementing the GPR system. This paper proposes a simple and stable wireless automatic synchronization method based on our developed GPR system, which does not need any synchronization chips or modules and reduces the cost of the hardware system. The transmitter omits the synchronization preamble and pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) at an appropriate time interval, while receiver automatically estimates the synchronization time and receives the returned signal from the underground targets. All the processes are performed in a single FPGA. The performance of the proposed synchronization method is validated with experiment.

Highlights

Low-frequency ground penetrating radar (GPR) is an advanced geophysical technique that is rapidly and widely applied in deep detection [1, 2]
In order to achieve high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), pseudorandom coded signals had been applied in some detection applications, such as through-the-wall tracking and life detection [3,4,5,6]
Wire dipole antennas are more suitable for lowfrequency GPR system with large transmit power

Summary

Introduction

Low-frequency ground penetrating radar (GPR) is an advanced geophysical technique that is rapidly and widely applied in deep detection [1, 2]. In order to achieve high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), pseudorandom coded signals had been applied in some detection applications, such as through-the-wall tracking and life detection [3,4,5,6]. Pseudorandom coded signals had been used in GPR to obtain the deeper detection [7, 8]. Synchronization with fibers increases the power consumption, complicates the structure, and increases the cost of the radar system. It is terribly difficult to carry out experiments with complicate and heavy low-frequency GPR in polar glacier and high tableland [9, 10]

Methods

Results

Conclusion