WAVEFORM AND TRANSCEIVER OPTIMIZATION FOR MULTI-FUNCTIONAL AIRBORNE RADAR THROUGH ADAPTIVE PROCESSING

Pulse compression techniques have been widely used for target detection and remote sensing. The primary concern for pulse compression is the sidelobe interference. Waveform design is an important method to improve the sidelobe performance. As a multi-functional aircraft platform in aviation safety domain, ADS-B system performs functions involving detection, localization and alerting of external traffic. In this work, a binary phase modulation is introduced to convert the original 1090 MHz ADS-B signal waveform into a radar signal. Both the statistical and deterministic models of new waveform are developed and analyzed. The waveform characterization, optimization and its application are studied in details. An alternative way to achieve low sidelobe levels without trading o range resolution and SNR is the adaptive pulse compression - RMMSE (Reiterative Minimum Mean-Square error). Theoretically, RMMSE is able to suppress the sidelobe level down to the receiver noise floor. However, the application of RMMSE to actual radars and the related implementation issues have not been investigated before. In this work, implementation aspects of RMMSE such as waveform sensitivity, noise immunity and computational complexity are addressed. Results generated by applying RMMSE to both simulated and measured radar data are presented and analyzed. Furthermore, a two-dimensional RMMSE algorithm is derived to mitigate the sidelobe effects from both pulse compression processing and antenna radiation pattern. In addition, to achieve even better control of the sidelobe level, a joint transmit and receive optimization scheme (JTRO) is proposed, which reduces the impacts of HPA nonlinearity and receiver distortion. Experiment results obtained with a Ku-band spaceborne radar transceiver testbed are presented

Statistical Analysis of Coherent Monostatic and Bistatic Radar Sea Clutter

Radar sea clutter analysis has been an important area of radar research for many years. Very limited research has been carried out on coherent monostatic sea clutter analysis and even less on bistatic sea clutter. This has left a significant gap in the global scientific knowledge within this area. This thesis describes research carried out to analyse, quantify and model coherent sea clutter statistics from multiple radar sources. The ultimate goal of the research is to improve maritime radars' ability to compensate for clutter and achieve effective detection of targets on or over the sea surface. The first analyses used monostatic data gathered during the fight trials of the Thales Searchwater 2000 AEW radar. A further sea clutter trials database from CSIR was then used to investigate the variation of clutter statistics with look angle and grazing angle. Finally simultaneous monostatic and bistatic sea clutter data recorded in South Africa using the S-band UCL radar system NetRAD were analysed. No simultaneous monostatic and bistatic coherent analysis has ever been reported before in the open literature. The datasets recorded included multiple bistatic angles at both horizontal and vertical polarisations. Throughout the analysis real data have been compared to accepted theoretic models of sea clutter. An additional metric of comparison was investigated relating to the area of information theoretic techniques. Information theory is a significant subject area, and some concepts from it have been applied in this research. In summary this research has produced quantifiable and novel results on the characteristics of sea clutter statistics as a function of Doppler. Analysis has been carried out on a wide range of monostatic and bistatic data. The results of this research will be extremely valuable in developing sea clutter suppression algorithms and thus improving detection performance in future maritime radar designs

A quasi-real-time inertialess microwave holographic imaging system

This thesis records the theoretical analysis and hardware development of a laboratory microwave imaging system which uses holographic principles. The application of an aperture synthesis technique and the electronic commutation of all antennae has resulted in a compact and economic assembly - which requires no moving parts and which, consequently, has a high field mapping speed potential. The relationship of this microwave holographic system to other established techniques is examined theoretically and the performance of the imaging system is demonstrated using conventional optically- and numerically-based reconstruction of the measured holograms. The high mapping speed potential of this system has allowed the exploitation of an imaging mode not usually associated with microwave holography. In particular, a certain antenna array specification leads to a versatile imaging system which corresponds closely in the laboratory scale to the widely used synthetic aperture radar principle. It is envisaged that the microwave holographic implementation of this latter principle be used as laboratory instrumentation in the elucidation of the interaction of hydrodynamic and electromagnetic waves. Some simple demonstrations of this application have been presented, and the concluding chapter also describes a suitable hardware specification. This thesis has also emphasised the hardware details of the imaging system since the development of the microwave and other electronic components represented a substantial part of this research and because the potential applications of the imaging principle have been found to be intimately linked to the tolerances of the various microwave components. Bibliography: pages 122-132

Roadmap on Transformation Optics

Transformation Optics asks Maxwell's equations what kind of electromagnetic medium recreate some smooth deformation of space. The guiding principle is Einstein's principle of covariance: that any physical theory must take the same form in any coordinate system. This requirement fixes very precisely the required electromagnetic medium. The impact of this insight cannot be overestimated. Many practitioners were used to thinking that only a few analytic solutions to Maxwell's equations existed, such as the monochromatic plane wave in a homogeneous, isotropic medium. At a stroke, Transformation Optics increases that landscape from `few' to `infinity', and to each of the infinitude of analytic solutions dreamt up by the researcher, corresponds an electromagnetic medium capable of reproducing that solution precisely. The most striking example is the electromagnetic cloak, thought to be an unreachable dream of science fiction writers, but realised in the laboratory a few months after the papers proposing the possibility were published. But the practical challenges are considerable, requiring meta-media that are at once electrically and magnetically inhomogeneous and anisotropic. How far have we come since the first demonstrations over a decade ago? And what does the future hold? If the wizardry of perfect macroscopic optical invisibility still eludes us in practice, then what compromises still enable us to create interesting, useful, devices? While 3D cloaking remains a significant technical challenge, much progress has been made in 2- dimensions. Carpet cloaking, wherein an object is hidden under a surface that appears optically flat, relaxes the constraints of extreme electromagnetic parameters. Surface wave cloaking guides sub-wavelength surface waves, making uneven surfaces appear flat. Two dimensions is also the setting in which conformal and complex coordinate transformations are realisable, and the possibilities in this restricted domain do not appear to have been exhausted yet. Beyond cloaking, the enhanced electromagnetic landscape provided by Transformation Optics has shown how fully analytic solutions can be found to a number of physical scenarios such as plasmonic systems used in electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) and cathodoluminescence (CL). Are there further fields to be enriched? A new twist to Transformation Optics was the extension to the space-time domain. By applying transformations to space-time, rather than just space, it was shown that events rather than objects could be hidden from view; Transformation Optics had provided a means of effectively redacting events from history. The hype quickly settled into serious nonlinear optical experiments that demonstrated the soundness of the idea, and it is now possible to consider the practical implications, particularly in optical signal processing, of having an `interrupt-without-interrupt' facility that the so-called temporal cloak provides. Inevitable issues of dispersion in actual systems have only begun to be addressed. Now that time is included in the programme of Transformation Optics, it is natural to ask what role ideas from General Relativity can play in shaping the future of Transformation Optics. Indeed, one of the earliest papers on Transformation Optics was provocatively titled `General Relativity in Electrical Engineering'. The answer that curvature does not enter directly into transformation optics merely encourages us to speculate on the role of Transformation Optics in defining laboratory analogues. Quite why Maxwell's theory defines a `perfect' transformation theory, while other areas of physics such as acoustics are not apparently quite so amenable, is a deep question whose precise, mathematical answer will help inform us of the extent to which similar ideas can be extended to other fields. The contributors to this roadmap review, who are all renowned practitioners or inventors of Transformation Optics, will give their perspectives into the field's status and future development