An ultra high resolution FMCW radar

Bibliography: leaves 127-128.There is a great need for real-time non-intrusive measurements in industry. A short-range radar system can be used to make these measurements. A standard requirement for these type of applications is high resolution. This is a standard problem in radar. Using classical signal processing techniques, the range resolution is proportional to the bandwidth of the transmitted signal. This poses a serious problem in radar as very large bandwidths are required - typically lSOGHz for 1 mm range resolution. Alternative techniques have been sought which do not rely on large transmitted bandwidths, but which rely on large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Such techniques exist in modem spectral analysis eg. auto-regressive techniques. These techniques model the data. In other words, they assume a priori information. Linear frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar was utilized, since a pulsed radar would require very precise time measurements due to the short range (a few ns). The FMCW radar would have to be very linear for the modelling process to work properly. The frequency domain measurement of the received system data would then be proportional to range. An FMCW radar system was built and tested. The modem signal processing techniques were found to work well when injected with sinusoidal signals from signal generators. The hardware was also found to perform satisfactorily. However, amplitude modulation was observed in the mixing process and subsequently, the modelling process did not perform satisfactorily when interfaced to the hardware. Due to the amplitude modulation problem, two closely-spaced targets disrupted the high resolution properties of the modelling process. Nevertheless, a single target could be resolved within a resolution bin of better than 1 cm. A solution is proposed in chapter eight, however, it is out of the scope of this thesis