Abstract
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral USRP NI2920, a software defined transceiver so far mainly used in Software Defined Radio applications, is adopted in this work to design a high resolution L-Band Software Defined Radar system. The enhanced available bandwidth, due to the Gigabit Ethernet interface, is exploited to obtain a higher slant-range resolution with respect to the existing Software Defined Radar implementations. A specific LabVIEW application, performing radar operations, is discussed, and successful validations are presented to demonstrate the accurate target detection capability of the proposed software radar architecture. In particular, outdoor and indoor test are performed by adopting a metal plate as reference structure located at different distances from the designed radar system, and results obtained from the measured echo are successfully processed to accurately reveal the correct target position, with the predicted slant-range resolution equal to 6 m.
Highlights
Radar systems have been employed for a long time mainly in military operation, like target detection, target recognition, surveillance, and other specific applications, such as meteorology and air-traffic control
Since one of the most relevant problems of Software Defined Radar (SDRadar) developing is related to a low slant-range resolution, due to the low speed of its interface, the main goal of this work is to explore the potentialities of the National Instruments (NI) new generation Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) in order to enhance this specific parameter, taking advantage of the Gigabit Ethernet Interface
A low cost, flexible, compact, and versatile solution to create an L-Band SDRadar system has been proposed in this work
Summary
Radar systems have been employed for a long time mainly in military operation, like target detection, target recognition, surveillance, and other specific applications, such as meteorology and air-traffic control. Especially in the last recent years, new kind of large-scale commercial applications is requiring the standard radar system operations, but according to significant cost reduction and strong adaptability. Medical diagnostics and automotives are just some examples of the possible application fields. According to this new operating context, Software Defined Radar (SDRadar) could represent a new challenge in radar technology due to the possibility of performing most of the basic operations (i.e., mixing, filtering, modulation, and demodulation) by employing software modules in order to strike out most of the specific hardware [1]. New researches are recently conducted to implement a SDRadar for target distance detection [2, 3], but they are based on the use of sophisticated FPGA and/or DSP, being not able to guarantee the required cost reduction
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