Examine radar operation at the basic introductory level for several diverse types of coherent radar systems including: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Moving Target Indicator (MTI), Pulse-Doppler (PD), Continuous Wave (CW), and Phased Array Radar systems. Focus on exploring performance limitations relative to an ideal system. Better understand coherent radar performance in the presence of contaminating factors associated with system instabilities, real-world clutter, and hardware errors.

• Engineers and scientists involved in the research, analysis, design, and development of coherent radar systems

• Determine the nonideal performance of coherent radar systems, insofar as the most salient functions and the most salient contaminating sources of system instability are concerned

• Coherent Radar Overviews
  • Pulsed Doppler
  • Synthetic Aperture Radar
  • Moving Target Indicator
  • Pulse Compression
  • Tracking Errors
  • Continuous Wave Radar
• Environment Error Sources: Propagation, Clutter, Noise, and EMI
• Component Hardware Error Sources from Transmitters, Receivers, and Exciters
• Phased Array Antenna Performance Considerations
• Testing Considerations for Sub-Systems, Systems, and Phase Noise

Participants receive a complete set of handouts from the lectures, a CD-ROM of all presentations, analysis, and simulation software demonstrated, and a related text, Coherent Radar Performance Estimation (Artech House, 1993).

Radar systems background would be helpful though not required.

• James A. Saffold
• James A. Scheer
• Mark Mitchell
• Robert Howard
• Samuel O. Piper
• Tracy V. Wallace

This course is an elective for the following:

• Radar Systems Certificate
• Radar Signal Processing & Techniques Certificate