Applications of impulse radar technology

This paper describes the technology of impulse radar and provides examples of how this class of radar system is finding use in a wide variety of civil and military applications. With the reduction in the defence budgets of many governments there has been a shift in the emphasis on radar development to dual-use technology systems that can offer improved performance, in terms of range resolution, imaging and target identification. Impulse radar technology offers a special capability and in terms of the ideal radar ambiguity function the impulse radar can exhibit a near optimum response. The emphasis of this paper is on the applications of high resolution, impulse radar such as airborne terrain profiling, law enforcement, forensic applications, ground probing applications as well as some military applications such as non-cooperative target detection, mine detection, vehicles concealed in vegetation canopy and high resolution detection of targets in high clutter environments. This paper is structured into three main subject areas. The first covers the principles that are relevant to the transient waveforms. The second introduces suitable radar components such as antennas, signal sources, receivers and algorithms for the processing of impulse waveforms. The third describes some of the variety of applications of impulse radar technology