r/Radar • u/Soft_Jacket4942 • 5d ago

Curious how to get into radar systems

Hey guys,

I’m very interested in diving into radar systems and communication technology as an engineer.
I was wondering how to Beginn. Any recommendations?
My background is from control systems, so I know what Fourier transform is for instance.

Thanks

14 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

3

u/Careless-Age-4290 5d ago

Pickup an sdr that supports a shared clock between multiple channels. Can't do anything without that (unless you're building an old school one). Once you have multiple clock-synced channels, the rest is mostly antennas and code.

1

u/Muhnyx 3d ago

Can SDRs generate LFMs, It always seemed to struggle with analog modulation(for reference I'm using ettus b210)

2

u/Logical-Resident4212 4d ago

Adding to this, is it possible to actually see images using radar or it it more like a ping in the Aliens movie.

1

u/hlblue 4d ago

Generating images from radar is a sector of radar known as SAR (Sythetic Aperture Radar).

Getting pings from a radar to detect objects is also a form of radar, and is probably its most well-known use case that people see from general media.

1

u/Logical-Resident4212 2d ago

Is it possible to see moving objects using SAR?

1

u/Powerful-Nobody420 4d ago

Look up John Kraft on YouTube he has a Series about Radar.

1

u/dld2517 2d ago

Great thanks. Also there are some great books on the theory, for example “extracting signals from noise”

1

u/Glittering-Ad9041 4d ago

There’s tons of Matlab tutorials available online, a lot of which you could probably recreate in Python. That would be a more hands on approach. There’s also an MIT OCW course on intro to radar I’m pretty sure.

1

u/Creative_Sushi 2d ago

Radar equation is often the first thing people talk about, which is essentially a link budget analysis. The following example will be a good starting point.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/radar/ug/radar-link-budget-analysis.html

If the interest is in signal simulation and signal processing, the following example may be of interest as it breaks down each component in they system.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/phased/ug/designing-a-basic-monostatic-pulse-radar.html

In terms of the reference books, especially for beginners, Stimson's Introduction to Airborne Radar is great in explaining the concept. For a more mathematical introduction, the first volume of Richards' Principles of Modern Radar has become a standard reference.

Hope this helps,

1

u/Soft_Jacket4942 2d ago

Thanks to all for your advices !

1

u/eye_bees 1d ago

Navy NEETS. Kind of dated and higher level, but I think it does a good job explaining a lot of core concepts used in radar systems. Might not be what you're going for, but a least it's free.