L-Band UWB Short-Pulse Radar

This is my senior design project at Michigan State University

•An L-Band UWB Short-Pulse Radar

•80 mW peak transmit power

•2 nS short-pulse

•500 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth

•Saturated MMIC/Butterworth HPF short-pulse forming circuitry

•Coherent, single conversion transmit/receive chains

•Applications include looking through the ground or rubble of a building

Summary

ECE480 senior design project.  This radar system creates a UWB impulse of 2nS in duration.  The impulse is created by clipping a Mini-Circuits MMIC amplifier, then high-pass filtering the output with a 600 MHz 5th order Butterworth.  The output of the pulse generator is fed into a mixer, up converted to 2 GHz, amplified to 80 mW peak power, then radiated towards a target scene.  Received RF is coherently converted down to base-band the same way, then digitized using a random sampling scope.

Engineering Notes and Schematics

Short-Pulse radar block diagram

Short-Pulse radar notes and schematics