Hycam: A new S band surface radar testbed

In 2008, ONERA started designing, for the French MoD, an S band surface radar testbed in the aim to support studies of new radar architectures. The core idea was to build a “high versatility system” able to collect data representative of most of ongoing radar projects, but also to prepare future developments. Within this context, we have defined and built a system that can address studies such as the use of new waveforms, multi function's scheduling optimisation, the benefit of using high bandwidths for recognition, the advantage of polarimetry for target or environment identification, beam sharpening, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configurations, etc...The system, named HYCAM, was delivered late 2011 and this paper presents its main features and components.