Radar design

Today radar is entering many more new domains of application than the traditional ones of military and civil traffic control, such as weather and climate research, agriculture, water surface pollution,  automotive and security systems. Actually too large a diversity of applications to list and discuss all of them.

The course aims at providing understanding on the operation of the various subsystems and how each of them affects the behaviour of the integrated system. You will also learn how the various parameters of radar and its design impact the performance in terms of detection range, accuracies, robustness, etc.

The thread in the course is the case study of the design of a real radar system, in which all the various topics will be discussed in a proper context. Besides the theoretical parts and case studies, there are demonstrations of (small) operating radar systems and excursions to measurement set-ups of radars or antennas.

Insight into systems and the effects of radar design

The course:

• Offers the basic principles of radar
• Discusses the function blocks of radar systems
• Gives insight in the connection between physical, technological and scientific aspects affecting the expected properties of radar systems
• Describes the physical phenomena affecting the propagation and reflection of radio waves
• Discusses the detection process of radar systems; the effective radar cross section of objects and its scintillation, the effect on the detection probabilities and possibilities for improvement
• Handles the more technological issues, such as transmitters, receivers, antennas, signal processing and radars with active and passive phased array antennas
• Elaborates on the principles of imaging radar in remote sensing (Synthetic Aperture Radar – SAR, detecting with SAR and Inverse SAR)
   

Intended for
Engineers (academics or higher professional education) involved in the purchase, use or design of radar on system level.

The course will be presented in English.