A novel compact UWB ground penetrating radar system

The impulse ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has a significant advantage than other radar systems, due to their high-resolution and simple system architecture. In this paper, a novel low-cost and compact impulse ultrawideband (UWB) GPR system is presented. The steep edged narrow pulse generation in the transmitter is solved with the step recovery diodes (SRD). In order to simplify the structure and improve the performance, a compact UWB antenna is employed which based on using of two smoothly shaped flares of a simple geometrical structure. Furthermore, the receiver employs a new ultra wideband digital sampling technology to realize analog-to-digital conversion instead of using commercial integrated ADC. This novel digital sampling technology is the first to employ both the successive-approximation-register technology and the equivalent-time-sampling technology to improve the sampling rate and the bandwidth of the receiver. Experimental GPR survey data obtained from different applications are presented. It is shown that the developed system has good ability for different detection applications.