Design and Realization of a cheap Ground Penetrating Radar Prototype @ 2.45 GHz

This article aims at describing our design of Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) design, that works at 2.4 GHz. Inspired from a similar radar design built by MIT Lincoln Laboratory [1], our radar maintains the same characteristic of cheapness, but it allows to choose and switch toward a larger number of modulation patterns for obtaining modulations such as saw tooth, triangular, Frequency-Shift Keying (FSK), and Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW). In order to control the modulation pattern, and to receive the synchronization pulse together with the detected signal, the transceiver is connected to a laptop by means of Universal Serial Bus (USB), and audio port. Data elaboration can so make use of a custom software code, based on commercial software libraries, specific for data and image treatment. Moreover, the design of the antenna should be treated with care so that the signal reaches a larger depth even if it uses a higher frequency than usually.