A novel design of an ultra-fast wideband polarimetric radar

Accurate high resolution measurements of both clutter and man-made targets at millimeter-wave frequencies have become an essential requirement for the development of optimal target detection and tracking algorithms. Towards this end, an ultra-fast wideband polarimetric instrumentation radar was developed by The University of Michigan for millimeter-wave frequencies applications. With this new design, the scattering matrix of a target can be measured over a bandwidth of 840 MHz in less than 32 /spl mu/sec, hence, one foot resolution fully polarimetric radar images can easily be generated using this system. The design is directly applicable to microwave instrumentation radars.