A novel technique to characterize the effect of rain over a radome for radar applications

A novel instrument to characterize the effect of wet radomes in radar systems is presented. The focus of this research is enabling full characterization of radome performance under a variety of conditions including cleanliness, dirtiness, and wetness, and to provide a potential solution for wet radome characterization. The proposed method consists of using a low profile instrument that can be easily integrated into an existing or new radar system. A low profile dielectric antenna connected to the reflectometer employs the time domain gating (TDG) analysis, which is used to minimize the impact of undesirable reflections. The concept was validated with on-field experiments.