Sea State Monitoring HF Radar Controller Using Reconfigurable LabView FPGA

High Frequency (HF) Radars are used extensively for ocean observation and to provide synoptic current maps covering thousands of kilometres. HF Radar for Ocean observation is under development at SAMEER, IIT Bombay Campus. The project is funded by the Government of India, Ministry of Earth Sciences. The controller for this Radar is designed using NI LabVIEW 8.5 Professional System Development platform, National Instruments high precision R series NI PXI 7833 intelligent DAQ with reconfigurable FPGA and onboard memory, NI LabVIEW FPGA compiler and NI PXI 1033 chassis for PC interface. This design is implemented as two modules. 1. FPGA Module:-generates Carrier modulating chirp, switching pulses, synchronising and control signals for operating the radar, and receives Receiver signal samples in FPGA buffers. This design is compiled and synthesised on Xilinx Virtex-ll reconfigurable FPGA with 3M gates. 2. Host Module: - This module runs on the Host PC. It is used for reconstruction of time domain Signal (TDS), Power Spectrum (PS) and FFT computation of intra and inter sweep radar echo´s, signal processing and wave spectral analysis and display, waveform storage as .jpeg and .bmp files for offline analysis, velocity and significant wave height limit detection and storm/disaster prediction. The FPGA and LabVIEW based design has resulted in a very deterministic system performance, reduced development time and cost and is reconfigurable to adapt new features.