Low-cost radar receiver for european space surveillance

The design and development of a ground-based radar demonstrator for space surveillance has been funded by the European Space Agency within the Space Situational Awareness Preparatory Programme. The demonstrator is composed of separate phased array transmit antenna system - developed by Indra - and phased array receive antenna system - developed by Fraunhofer FHR. This paper addresses the criteria followed in the design of the whole receiver, which implements direct RF sampling, full digitization of the antenna aperture, and multi-beam digital beamforming. Selected solutions for the RF and digital boards are discussed against the system requirements, and preliminary results from the acceptance tests of the receiver subsystem are presented.