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Superregenerative Receiver:!
!
Uses feedback to cause oscillations at the desired RF. Uses
high gain single stage circuit. Suffers from relatively poor
sensitivity, phase and frequency stability. Consequently it
suffers from high noise. Not widely used these days !
Receiver Types
Homodyne Receivers:!
!
A portion of the transmit signal is used as a local oscillator input to a
mixer via a circulator (often called a duplexer in this configuration). It
requires the transmitter to be transmitting when the receiver is
working. Not unsurprisingly it is used in (low cost) cw applications
mainly.!
Receiver Types
Superheterodyne receivers:!
!
The received signal from the antenna is coupled through the
duplexer to the mixer after amplification in an LNA. The local
oscillator synchronizes transmission and reception so that phase
may be determined. Sometimes two stages of mixing or down
conversion are used. Band pass filtering rejects unwanted mixing
products and out of band signals. This is much more commonly
used in advanced radar systems. The LNA output can be split into
two channels to facilitate I and q demodulation for coherent
detection.!
Receiver Types
Digital receivers:!
!
Direct digitization at RF is still rare and the subject of on-going
research. However, second stage down conversion is used less and
less with digitization taking place at IF and a Hilbert transform
applied to extract the signal and echo induced baseband
modulations.!
!
Almost all modern radar systems will digitize received signals prior to
target detection and further processing. Indeed most radar signal
processing will assume that digital signals are available.!
!
Digital signals are more reliable and much more flexible than their
analogue counterparts. However, they are limited by dynamic range
(number of bits and linearity).!
!
One day all radars are likely to be phased arrays with each element
having direct RF digitization.!
A typical Radar Receiver
Selex!
Demodulation and Envelope Detection
Demodulation Types
Non-coherent Demodulation:!
!
This converts the IF signal to baseband after which display and/or
further (usually digital) processing takes places. Non-coherent
demodulation results in the amplitude of the envelope only of the
IF signal (i.e. no phase). It is used in older and simple low cost
radar systems. !
!
Diode detection provides for a low pass filtering approach which
is simple and cheap (and a bit nasty). !
!
Demodulation Types
Non-coherent demodulation:!
!
Square law detectors are more common where the signal is
mixed with itself (which squares the signal) and then low pass
filtered. The IF is usually selected to be much higher than the
highest video frequency which simplifies selection of the lo pass
filter. !
Demodulation Types
Non-coherent demodulation:!
!
Logarithmic amplifiers have been used in an attempt to achieve
very wide dynamic range (think dBs). They typically consist of a
chain of limiting amplifiers which form the logarithmic function.
Their outputs are summed to from the detected signal whose
voltage is proportional to the log of the input signal. 70 to 80 dBs
dynamic range can be achieved. However, it is difficult to get
perfect log conversion and this has prohibited their take up.!
Coherent Demodulation
Any fast frequency modulation present in the radar system will degrade
coherence adversely. This is important as analysis of phase is a direct
measure of target velocity and will therefore lead to errors. It also upsets
a radars ability to cancel clutter which is necessary to reveal small
targets.!
!
Phase noise is caused by imperfect oscillators (I.e. imperfections in the
sine wave they produce).!
!
Phase noise is not usually “white” I.e. it does not have a uniform power
density.!
!
Phase noise tends to be highest at frequencies close to the carrier.!
Phase Noise
Filter Response for Clutter
and Phase Noise
This is the frequency response of a single and double delay MTI filter
for a 1kHz PRF. Also shown are the clutter spread and phase noise. It
shows the phase noise to be increasing the amount of apparent
clutter power in the MTI filter pass-band!
Receiver Mismatch Errors
• Phase noise!
!
These sources of mismatch error can result in a degraded point
spread function, often generating undesired ghost images and
otherwise higher side-lobes. Digitization can provide a route to erro
correction.!
Receiver Mismatch Errors
Receiver Dynamic Range
Radar echoes have a very wide dynamic range (approx. 120 dB)due to
the difference in reflectivity of targets and to the 1/R4 dependency
Receiver dynamic range is limited by both the analogue (particularly the
mixers and amplifiers) and digital (i.e. the number of bits) components.!
!
The lower limit is the noise floor of the radar system and the upper limit
non-linear effects in the amplifier or mixers.!
!
Non-linearity creates distortions in echo signals which can be confused
with real targets.!
!
Sensitivity Time Control (STC) is used to cope with the wide dynamic
range. Increasing attenuation is switched as range reduces to adjust
the available dynamic range to be optimum. A 1/R4 function would
maintain a constant amplitude for a target of fixed RCS.!
!
Radar systems often do not have sufficient instantaneous dynamic
range and this is a “bottleneck” that is still to be fully addressed.!
Receiver Dynamic Range
Receiver Dynamic Range
Analogue to Digital Conversion
The input signal is applied to a track and hold circuit which holds the
sampled signal constant until analogue to digital conversion is
completed. The timing circuit is triggered by the sampling frequency
which governs the duration over which conversion can take place.
The limit on the aperture window is determined by the sampling speed
of the A/D and the dynamic range by the number of bits. The output is
a digital stream available for radar signal processing.!
Analogue to Digital Conversion
The relationship between the input analogue signal and the output
digital signal is given by:!
! b
! Va = VFS (" ai 2 !i ) + qe
! i=1
!
Where VFS is the full scale (saturation) voltage of the ADC, ai is the
value of the ith bit of the digital representation (0 or 1) and qe is the
quantization error. !
!
The quantization error is designed to be less than plus or minus half the
least Significant Bit (LSB):!
b
1
Va !VFS " ai 2 !i = qe < LSB
i=1 2
Analogue to Digital Conversion
!
1 # g(" ) !
1
g(t) = " g(t)
g(t) = $ #"
! "# t " " !t
Time domain! Frequency domain!
Quantization
Quantization
Quantization
Quantization
The choice of the number of bits and the quantization step size govern
the trade-off between the dynamic range and the quantization error of
the digital signal.!
!
The dynamic range, DR, is given by:!
! b!1
! 2 "
DR = = 2 b!1
! "
Where ! is the step size and b is the total number of bits!
!
Taking the log:!
! b!1
! DR(dB) = 20 log10 (2 ) = (b !1)20 log10 (2) = 6.02b ! 6.02dB
!
This shows that the dynamic range that can be represented at the
ADC output without saturation increases be 6dB (approx.) per bit!
!
Quantization
Further Reading