ONR Fine Scale Ocean Measurements SBIR
Abstract
This report is a summary of work performed under the ONR SBIR contract 'Fine-Scale Measurements of Microwave Backscatter from the Outer Surface'. Enclosed with this report is a block diagram of a short-pulse radar system that should meet all system requirements, along with a signal-to-noise analysis of the proposed system. During the period covered by this report an effort was made to focus in on the most cost effective way to implement a short pulse radar system, considering microwave and R.F. requirements along with the constraints of affordable, commercially available data-acquisition systems. Several competing implementations were considered, falling into two major categories: a conventional chirped radar employing a dispersive delay expander and compressor devices and a stretch processor technique, using a dispersive expander and a correlation mixer. The first approach leads to a straight-forward radar design, allowing use of a commercially available matched expander/ compressor pair, but requires a high-end data acquisition system in order to sample the compressed pair, but requires a high-end data acquisition system in order to sample the compressed pulse every 10 nS. The second approach, following a design used by NASA in the mid-1970s for the AAFE altimeter, may use a more modest data acquisition system with considerably lower video bandwidth, but requires a significant increase in complication for the R.F. design.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 03, 1990
- Accession Number
- ADA225221
Entities
People
- James Mead