Evolutionary Developments of Today’s Remote Sensing Radar Technology—Right From the Telemobiloscope: A review

Today, remote sensing systems/technologies are one of the most essential requirements for civil and military sectors for various applications. This review article discusses the evolutionary developments of today’s remote sensing radar/optical/electronic warfare (EW) technologies, right from the telemobiloscope. This review article addresses the fundamentals of radar sensing techniques, top-level radar classifications, and revolutionary developments of antenna technologies for remote sensing applications. The various techniques available for radar waveform design, a characteristics analysis of it using ambiguity functions (AFs), pulse compression/stretch processing, a time-frequency (T-F) analysis, and so on are reviewed. The significant transformations that have happened in radar system engineering since vacuum tube microwave devices are reported. Contemporary societal applications of radar systems, tracking and guidance radar systems, advanced EW systems, photonics EW systems, and photonics signal processing are reviewed and reported. State-of-the-art optical technologies available for today’s remote sensing applications are discussed. In addition to these reviews, a comprehensive comparative study is performed in terms of available remote sensing systems/technologies, their typical operating frequency ranges, potential applications, types of waveforms, and so forth, and the quantitative results are reported.