Phase Noise And Its Changing Role In Radar Design And Test

By Mark Elo, Giga-tronics Incorporated

In war, conflicts and other military to military skirmishes we need to detect high velocity vehicles such as supersonic jet fighters. This drives how we optimized the performance of Radars and Electronic Warfare systems and their associated test equipment. While a requirement for this capability still exists, a great deal of modern uses of radar is for surveillance - be it monitoring factions in the Middle East, or analyzing scrupulous activity occurring at countries borders – this means we have to deal with much slower targets, such as vehicles, mules, and individuals.

This changing requirement is observed more specifically in Doppler Radar Systems. These radars rely on the same effect observed as the apparent change in frequency or pitch when a sound source moves either toward or away from the listener, or when the listener moves either toward or away from the sound source. As we will discuss this theory not only applies to sound waves, but is equally applicable at microwave signal frequencies as well.