Low cost digitalization of an X-band, non coherent weather radar

Meteor 200 is an X-band non coherent weather radar completely implemented by means of analog technology. To enhance its operation, a processing system based on a digital signal processing board in a personal computer has been devised. The system has been realized using a low cost digital signal processor (DSP) printed circuit board based on the TMS 320 C30 (Texas Instruments) device and supplied by the radar meteorology group of the IFA/CNR (Institute for Atmospheric Physics/National Council of Research, Italy). The printed circuit board accepts as an input the radar trigger, the radar video and the clock; the latter can be internal or external to the radar. The board performs A/D conversion, acquisition and processing of radar signals from 500 to 900 range bins per sweep; the processing permits the computation of reflectivity factor by azimuth averaging either on log scale, or on (reconstructed) linear scale, or both. In this way a flexible signal processing is obtained, very suited to research purposes. The architecture has been implemented in his hardware and software parts and some test results have been obtained.