Antenna front-end concepts of a low-cost coherent radar demonstrator for S-band application

Some of the concepts of an AESA antenna front-end for a low-cost coherent radar system demonstrator intended for maritime applications in the S-band are presented in this contribution. Manufacturing and maintenance cost reduction with respect to present commercial systems is achieved by replacing the conventionally used magnetron RF power generation and the mechanically rotated antenna by a semiconductor transmitter and an AESA antenna with custom-developed mixed-signal integrated circuits as core components of its T/R-modules. The operation with coherent signals facilitates the application of modern signal processing techniques in order to compensate for the heavily reduced peak transmit power.