Semicoherent Doppler processing technique

A coherent radar digital data collector (CRDDC) has been developed which records I, Q data obtained by sampling the receiver intermediate frequency (IF) of a fan-beam radar with a single A/D convertor. The paper describes the sampling technique which was developed for this application, called the semicoherent Doppler processing technique, which allows operation with radars employing a noncoherent transmitter such as a magnetron. Representative field results are presented for real targets and natural environments such as land and sea clutter. These results employing spectral analysis, which prove the viability of the sampling technique for Doppler processing, were obtained by processing data recorded by the CRDDC at a coastal site in California with an L-band fan-beam radar.