Optimisation of the radar for buried object detection

Radar instruments have become a prospective technology for buried object detection (BOD). Such radars have a specific propagation environment with extremely strong and frequency dependent attenuation and, as a result, short operational range. This fact dictates features of the radar´s parameters: wideband signals to provide a high range resolution (fractions of a meter), low carrier frequency (tens or hundreds MHz) and high energy budget (100-130 dB system performance (SP) for 10 ms integration time) to overcome signal attenuation. The requirements of having a wideband ranging signal and a low carrier frequency are partly in contradiction. As a result, ultrawideband (UWB) signals are used. The major goal of this paper is to examine the UWB low frequency pulse compression radar with fractional bandwidth B_F>1 for BOD from the position of performance analysis and optimisation and present some practical results