DIGITAL MONOPULSE DOPPLER RADAR AND DSP TEACHING

In 1995 several teams of EFREI students submitted a project to the Texas Instruments DSP Challenge. This paper describes the adventure of one project which passed with success the European semi-finals to go and participate to the worldwide final in May, 1996 in ATLANTA.

The winning project deals with the Digital Signal Processing (hardware and software) associated with a new class of a Digital Monopulse Doppler Radar. The study has been an interesting practical application of the Radar and DSP courses.

AXIR (Automatic X-Band Instrumentation Radar) is a very innovative design. The analog RF head is reduced to the minimum. The principal tasks are realized digitally by seven TMS 320 DSPs. Nearly all the circuits are located at the rear of the printed planar monopulse antenna.

The digital processors are organized on four PCBs (Printed Circuit Board)

1) Front-End Processor (Digital Pulse Compression and Doppler Filtering)

2) Tracker (Three Alpha-Beta evolutive filters smoothing the cartesian coordinates)

3) Radar Manager (Automatic determination of the waveform and of the coefficients)

4) Simulator and Built-In-Test-Equipment (BITE)

This low-cost tracking radar has many applications related to civil aviation, meteorological surveillance or general instrumentation.

This document was an entry in the 1996 DSP Solutions Challenge, an annual contest organized by TI to encourage students from around the world to find innovative ways to use DSPs. For more information on the TI DSP Solutions Challenge, see TI's World Wide Web site at www.ti.com.

*DISCLAIMER: This document was part of the DSP Solution Challenge 1995 European Team Papers. It may have been written by someone whose native language is not English. TI assumes no liability for the quality of writing and/or the accuracy of the information contained herein.

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