Design of K-band radar front-end for water level measurement

Water level is an important parameter for river hydrological monitoring. This paper introduces a compact K-band front-end with discrete components for river water level measurement. The radar front-end includes micro-strip antenna array, voltage-controlled oscillator and schottky diode mixer. To reduce the radar volume, only one micro-strip antenna array is used. To improve phase noise performance of the VCO, a compact mushroom ELV-EBG structure is used instead of conventional resonator. The results demonstrate that the antenna array has a gain of 23.8dB and three-decibel bandwidth in azimuth and elevation are both 11o; the output power of the voltage-controlled oscillator is more than 10dBm, and the phase noise is -95.6dBc/Hz@1MHz; the conversion loss of mixer is 7.18dB. The design satisfies the requirement of water level measurement radar applications.