Software-defined radar for MIMO and adaptive waveform applications

The development of a software-defined radar testbed is described. The testbed is to be used to explore advanced techniques such as multiple-input multiple-output radar and adaptive waveforms. The system features a fully programmable, dual-channel, arbitrary pulsed waveform generator with a quadrature downconverting receiver. The system can generate waveforms of up to 500 MHz instantaneous bandwidth at a center frequency tunable from 2-18 GHz. The RF front end features two independent transmit and receive channels that can be multiplexed between four dual-polarized transmit and four dual-polarized receive antennas.