| dc.description.abstract | In recent work conducted at the University of Oklahoma’s Advanced Radar Research Center, it has been shown that using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) offers a significant time reduction in taking wideband radar cross section (RCS) measurements, compared with traditional techniques. This has led to an interest as to whether or not the reduced measurement time enables wideband RCS measurements of moving targets. In an attempt to answer this question, this thesis presents a simulation framework for RCS extraction of a moving target.
Because the target is moving, it is assumed that measurements are taken in an outdoor environment. As such, ground clutter is the primary competing interference. It is shown that in order to recover the target RCS, range-Doppler filtering must be performed. As a result, the filter shape, available Doppler resolution, and signal-to-noise ratio become the primary determiners of performance. Some closed-form expressions are derived to help determine acceptable system parameters and improve performance.
Interfering signals from other transmitters are also considered in this work. It is shown that if an interfering signal corrupts part of the spectrum, filtering is impossible because the target cannot be located in the range-Doppler space. To combat this, the spectrum is nulled at points where interference occurs. This enables filtering to be applied; however, nulls will exist in the RCS measurement. Finally, some spectral reconstruction techniques are discussed and tested with the purpose of estimating pieces of the spectrum that were lost. | en_US |
