UWB Synthetic Aperture Radar for All-Weather Target Sensor

"We propose to develop an algorithm to use the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for air-to-ground target sensors. The only signals transmitted by UWB radars are very narrow pulses generated pseudo-randomly in time. The pulses we arecurrently using are ¿ nanosecond in duration and the energy extends approximately from roughly .8 to 3 gigahertz. This broad bandwidth provides a UWB radar huge processing gain, so it is very difficult to jam. Using the motion of the air-to-groundmunitions we can combine successive radar scans to form a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar that can image the target area. Because of the low frequency content of TM-UWB signals, they are able to penetrate rain, clouds, smoke, fogs, dust, evenfoliage and concrete. With UWB there is no carrier frequency, no up-conversion and no down-conversion, and the output stage can be a single transistor which creates a binary pulse, all resulting in decreased radio size, cost, and complexity. The duty cycleof the pulse generated by our current hardware is approximately 1/200, resulting in low power consumption. During Phase I, we will develop, simulate, and test the proposed algorithm for zero-ceiling, zero-visibility target sensor. The primary potentialmilitary application for this technology is the all-weather target sensors and detection and identification of obscured objects. Civilian applications include airborne mapping of buried cables, pip