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ECEN 5254 - Radar and Remote Sensing

3 credit hours

Catalog Description: This course will cover radar system design and its application to environmental remote sensing. Topics include wave propagation/scattering in different media, radar system components, radar equation, and signal processing techniques. Highlighted systems will be ground-penetrating radars, weather radars,incoherent scatter radars, synthetic-aperture radars, meteor radars,etc.

Prerequisites: ECEN 3400, Electromagnetic Fields and Waves, and Fourier Analysis.

Textbook: Notes and journal articles.

Goals: To provide the student with detailed knowledge about radar systems and their applications to remote sensing. After completing the class, students should be able to generate a paper design of an appropriate radar system for a given remote sensing application.

Topics:

  1. Wave propagation/scattering in different media: wave parameters, dispersion, reflection, refraction, attenuation, poynting vector.
  2. Radar system components:
    • Transmitter/signal characteristics: pulsed, FM-CW, chirp, etc.
    • Antenna: patterns, gain, impedance, phased arrays.
    • Channel: role in system.
    • Receiver: noise (system, antenna), baseband conversion, direct sampling, filtering, etc.
    • Detection: linear, Doppler, etc.
  3. Radar equation: hard target, soft target, rough surface, etc.
  4. Signal processing: pulse-width, IPP, Nyquist, aliasing, range, Doppler, power, spectrum (peak, shift, width).
  5. Applications:
    • Scattering: hard targets, Rayleigh, Mie, Bragg, rough surfaces.
    • Hard targets: police radar, ground-penetrating radar
    • Rayleigh: weather/precipitation radar
    • Mie, thermal: lidar, incoherent scatter radar
    • Bragg: wind profilers
    • Rough surfaces: synthetic aperture
Computer Usage:
  1. Choice of Matlab, Mathematica, or IDL.

Laboratory Projects:

  1. None.
ABET Category Content:
  • Engineering Science: 2 credits or 67%
  • Engineering Design: 1 credit or 33%