Technology for fully printable and rollable ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems

Ground penetrating radars (GPR) operate at U/VHF bands and utilize wide frequency sweep bandwidths thus require complex architectures and bulky broadband antennas. This compromises system portability for transportation and outdoor measurements. This paper presents a conformal radar system in which the passives, actives and antennas share the same flexible substrate utilizing inkjet-printed technologies; a proposed radar technology which is referred to as monolithic. The system integration, packaging and measurements of the entire system are presented. In addition, the flexibility performance is benchmarked showing excellent performance as a rollable GPR system.