Modern Radar Systems Analysis:

Modern Radar System are of great importance for both military and civil applications.

The main problem of a typical radar system is the detection of return pulses; this substantially corresponds to determining the presence or absence of a pulse in noise. For such radar systems, the band width is usually chosen as the reciprocal of the pulse width to maximize the received signal to noise ratio (S/N). A matched digital filter which can maximize the S/N ratio is applied in this case.

The block diagram of a modern radar system is shown in Fig. 15.45. There is an A/D converter in the receiver to permit the processing of the return signals in digital form. The digital data is sent to the matched filter, followed by a digital detector. It is interesting to observe that subsequent digital processing and interpretation can be done by a radar computer (software or hardware implemented), which also carries out the supervision and control of the whole radar system (in particular with procedures of tracking-scheduling it controls and adjusts the performance of the antenna, receiver, A/D conversion, digital matched filtering and digital detection). The radar system is thus a sophisticated digital adaptive system.