Implementation of a low cost synthetic aperture radar using Software Defined Radio

GNU radio is a free open-source software toolkit for building software radios, in which software defines the transmitted waveforms and demodulates the received waveforms. In this paper an attempt has been made to explore the means to use a Software Defined Radio (SDR) to implement a basic radar system and then synthetic aperture radar. An experiment where in readings at two different scenarios (free environment and metal object) are taken into account and their plots are also given. This has been attempted keeping in mind the exponential increase in chip computing power and the ability to upgrade a radio transceiver via software updates with a marginal investment, the two features which makes such a foray attractive, technology wise and cost wise. This attempt also takes us a step closer to establishing the concept of a Cognitive radar which is software signal processing intensive.