Radar altimeter receiver based on software radio technology

A hardware platform and software architecture based on software radio technology is presented and applied to the design of a radar altimeter receiver. According to this structure, we set up a system consisting of two circuit boards; one is a ground echo generator using an FPGA as core chip; the other is a signal processor adopting a combination scheme of DSP and FPGA which has a coherent and an incoherent channel independent of each other to have strong robust capabilities. The flow chart of the software is also given. Experimental results show the method is simple and feasible, it could not only give height and velocity information, but also decrease time to market and thus quickly meet the demands of the end-user.