“Spurious” analysis of a wide bandwidth undersampled digitally heterodyned SFGPR

A key aspect of a previously proposed undersampled digitally heterodyned stepped frequency GPR is the capability to generate and acquire a large band of frequencies. This is obtained by moving most of the analog domain functionalities of the SFGPR into the digital one. In this paper an analysis of the aliased images generated by the digital frequency generator is performed. Its necessity is dictated by the large bandwidth needed to be generated to achieve high resolution and by the undersampling scheme chosen. The analysis was performed with the aid of different software tools developed ad hoc in a high level language. The key aspects of the analysis and its main results are discussed and illustrated.