A high performance time domain UWB radar design

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar has been developed over the last decade to provide compact, rugged, high performance capability for hand held applications such as anti-personnel landmine detection. This paper discusses the UWB radar system developed by ERA Technology which provides the radar sub-system of the MINEHOUND dual sensor detector. The UWB radar generates 200ps duration 15V impulses every 1ms and transmits these via an UWB antenna operating from 200MHz to 2GHz radiating 1ns duration wavelets. The UWB receiver applies a time varying gain profile to the incoming signal before sampling every 50ps. These samples are then down converted to base band using interleaving and an averaging process. The waveform sampling window is 19.2ns and this waveform is reconstructed over a period of 16.4ms at a refresh rate of 61Hz. The radar system is controlled by a Blackfin™ processor, which is responsible for dealing with control functions, signal processing and data output in audio form. The Blackfin™ core has been designed with control and DSP functions in mind and as such is ideally suited to this application. A key part of the control task is ensuring time and amplitude stability of the RF sampling over the full temperature range. The radar system consumes 2.3W which provides up to 8 hour operation from Li-Ion batteries.

David Daniels is the Chief Consultant for Sensors at ERA Technology and is responsible for the business and technical development of sensors for security and counter-terrorism in particular short-range UWB radar, IR image processing, magnetics, acoustics, millimetre wave and sub millimetre wave radar systems,. He has published over 90 technical papers and two books on ground penetrating radar (one awarded the IEE Rayleigh Book Award) as well as contributing to a number of seminal reference books in the field, including a contribution to Merrill Skolnik’s 3rd Edition Radar Handbook. David has made a key contribution to the development of radar for landmine detection, which has resulted in a new generation of detection equipment for humanitarian demining following successful trials in live minefields in Cambodia, Bosnia and Angola. David is active on many IET and IEEE radar International Conferences as well as a referee IoP, IET Electronics Letters, IET Proceedings, IEEE Trans on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE IGARSS, Optical Engineering (USA) and EPSRC, He was an Independent advisor to the UK Defence Scientific Advisory Council for six years and an invited radar expert to the NASA review panel for the MARS 2009 lander project.