High range resolution by means of synthetic bandwidth generated by frequency-stepped chirps

A method is presented to achieve large bandwidths with a synthetic chirp waveform adequate for short transmit pulses, which are typical for all millimetre-wave-radar applications using solid state transmitter stages. The usual ´stretch´ processing for the deramping of individual chirps of concatenated waveforms is avoided in order to be able to use measured instead of synthetic reference chirps to compensate all kinds of hardware-induced amplitude and phase errors. Due to ´spatial concatenation´ the method is applicable to scenarios with a range extent much larger than the chirp length.