Compensating for inconsistent high power vircator microwave radar pulse sources

Alastair D. McAulay

doi:10.1117/12.919435

3 May 2012 Compensating for inconsistent high power vircator microwave radar pulse sources

Alastair D. McAulay

Proceedings Volume 8361, Radar Sensor Technology XVI; 83610R (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.919435
Event: SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2012, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Abstract

We investigate a vircator as an economical high power pulsed microwave source for radar. Because of the inconsistency of spark gaps in the driver and operation of the tube based vircator, the resulting ringing pulse has a different pulse shape each time a pulse is generated. Therefore every time we pulse the source we must remove the effects of the ringing source pulse from the data resulting from that pulse. Scattering from a scene is considered random (white noise) with a superimposed non-white component due to the pulse. We propose a whitening filter to remove the effects of the ringing pulse from the random data. This produces a similar result as spectral factorization in which we first determine the pulse from the power spectrum of the data and then deconvolve the ringing pulse out of the received data. The removal of pulse specific ringing increases range resolution and allows data from sequential pulses from a single vircator or pulses from separate vircators to be combined for joint processing in a synthetic aperture radar.

Citation Download Citation

Alastair D. McAulay "Compensating for inconsistent high power vircator microwave radar pulse sources", Proc. SPIE 8361, Radar Sensor Technology XVI, 83610R (3 May 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.919435

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