Low-Cost, High-Performance VHF/UHF Radars for Military, Scientific, and Commercial Applications

With the advent of inexpensive CMOS electronics, it has become possible to design and construct high-performance VHF/UHF radar systems at relatively low costs. Remarkable advances have been made in the areas of solid-state amplifiers, digital sampling and processing hardware, as well as in computer hardware and software used to analyze and visualize physical results. In the proposed approach, commercially available components and sub-systems are utilized at they cross the high-cost threshold into the decidedly less costly mass markets. When clever design principles are applied and effective data acquisition algorithms are employed, one routinely achieves performance exceeding that of more costly systems built only a few years ago. Thus, the revolution in low-cost components triggers similar changes in the radar diagnostics available within the budgetary constraints of the Federal Government and the commercial market place. The proposed effort consists of a design study along with the associated development of a prototype system. Particular attention is paid to VHF systems near 140 MHz, where current technology is immature and prospects for securing frequency assignments for operations are good. A radar diagnostic in this portion of the VHF band is extremely effective for a variety of studies involving natural atmospheric and ionospheric processes, investigations of artificial perturbations of the atmosphere, identification of hard-target signatures and turbulent wakes of interest to the USAF, and commercial probing of the earth's sub-surface.