Radar applications can be found today in many sectors of the industry and the
number of implemented systems will keep increasing over time. Detecting and
measuring the distance of an object with more accuracy and reliability becomes
a complex task as possible interference sources are increasingly being deployed.
Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars, simple and commonly
used in the automotive industry, for example, suffer significantly from neighbouring
FMCW radars, as they can corrupt each other’s results and produce false positives
or limit their ability to detect weaker reflections.
This project aims at the improvement of an existing radio channel sounder, as
well as transitioning the system into a radar topology for target identification. The
modular radar architecture allows the integration of different Radio Frequency
(RF) stages present in the research group. The radar implements the Swept-Time
Delay Cross-Correlation (STDCC) technique of Pseudo-Noise (PN) sequences, where
amplitude and Doppler information can be extracted from multipath components,
characterising the radio channel obstacles. The radar parameters can be easily
adjusted on-the-fly to the environment being measured. A new RF front-end was
developed at 28 GHz using X-MWblocks from X-Microwave, a modular designing
and prototyping system for RF products. The baseband sequence generation has
been implemented into an all-digital Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based
system and tested in a controlled environment against a Commercial off-the-shelf
(COTS) FMCW radar
