Investigating a Portable Low-Cost Target Simulator for Doppler Radars

This article presents a study on employing a single-sideband (SSB) mixer as a target simulator for Doppler radar sensors. The SSB mixer modulates the continuous-wave radio frequency (RF) signal transmitted by the Doppler radar, similar to a moving target. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed target simulator, the response of a real human target performing a hand gesture is emulated using the target simulator. The spectrogram of the human hand gesture and the simulator-generated gesture have been compared for performance evaluation. A 5.8-GHz prototype of the proposed target simulator and the obtained experimental results are presented in the paper.