A design of coherent moving target simulator for inverse synthetic aperture radar

The moving target simulator is an important but intractable issue in the performance evaluation of modern radar. The consistence and correctness of output target echo-wave must be considered and quantization error must be minimized to make the simulated waveform more like a realistic echo. However, most of the simulators are based on analog method and have limited capability of imitating complex target echo. When the properties of the simulated targets change, these simulators always need to alter the physical structure, which is of course not convenient. In this article, a moving target echo simulator for inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) is introduced. This simulator is capable of producing target echo with minimized phase error. The phase error eliminating method in frequency domain is introduced in detail. Theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that the proposed simulator can produce vivid moving target echo. The correctness of the method is further validated by the circuit implementation.