NeXtRAD and RHINO radar: Harnessing the herd for networked radar

This paper demonstrates the use of open source hardware and software to implement the digital back end of a network of radars. i.e. RHINO platform - a highly capable reconfigurable platform serving both digitisation / synthesis and packetisation functions for a dual X and L band radar. The system is capable of arbitrary waveform generation for transmit, and can be configured at runtime and reprogrammed in the field if required. Two digitisation cards (FMC format) are used to capture the X and L band receive signals, and a DAC is used for waveform synthesis. The digital back end bandpass samples to lower both sample and data rates, and streams data to a processing back-end over a 1GBe link. The work shown here concentrates on this implementation, and highlights the current and expected performance for each subsystem.