Quasi-Orthogonal Burst Enhanced Radar Tomography

To address the MDA need for innovative radar waveforms, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop new Quasi-orthogonal Burst Enhanced Radar Tomography (QBERT). This proposed modulation scheme is based on development of an adaptive chaotic waveform generator that will be able to easily and quickly generate a large number of orthogonal waveforms to aid radar systems in highly cluttered and electronically jammed environments. The innovation in chaotic waveform generation will enable the QBERT to generate orthogonal waveforms that can be used for both legacy and in development radar systems. QBERT’s enhanced waveform generation algorithms improve SNR by 5 times, and offers a tighter range-Doppler ambiguity function, 50% lower power requirements on transmission due to the ability to continuously transmit signals and the use of broadband signals, near ideal peak-to-RMS ratio, and ease of implementation of signal processing because of chaotic signal self-synchronization, which, together, directly address the MDA radar system requirements. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of QBERT by simulating it and comparing the results to more conventional waveform techniques. In Phase II, POC plans to work with the MDA to test with real radar data to further show QBERT’s improved performance.