Recent advances in millimeter-wave radars

The usage of millimeter-wave radar systems is widened to a number of civil applications including: airborne radars for obstacle avoidance, altimetry and landing aids, automotive radars for collision avoidance, driving safety support, autonomous vehicle control, meteorological radars, radars for remote sensing applications, and radars for medical imaging and diagnostic. We review some of these developments supported by advances in millimeter-wave components and achievements in signal processing technique. A recently developed at the Institute of Radio Astronomy ground based millimeter-wave synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is described in more details as an example of the activity in the field. The hardware and software solutions introduced into the radar are described along with the results of the first radar tests.