Local urban battlefield surveillance - Final report
Publish date: 2009-01-08
Report number: FOI-R--2615--SE
Pages: 72
Written in: Swedish
Keywords:
- “See-through-the-wall”
- wall penetrating radar
- FMCW
- monopulse radar
- wave
- guide antennas
- array antennas
- urban environment
- battlefield surveillance
Abstract
This final report gives an account of the produced major results in the two-year Armed Forces' project Local Urban Battlefield Surveillance. One main aim of the project has been to identify and review the major phenomenological conditions for wall penetration with radar. In the description of these conditions are included both results from our own research as well as from international research activities. One partial item has concerned the development and evaluation of various hand-held Doppler based radar system concepts for the urban soldier with capability to see through walls and capacity for short range surveillance. A hand-held wall penetrating system concept has been studied, consisting of a multi-channel FMCW monopulse radar. In this work, it is shown that a relative bandwidth of about 10% is often not sufficient to meet the requirement for range resolution, demanding wider-band antennas. Another conclusion is that simultaneously high resolution in range and in closing speed requires research and development concerning signal processing with increased integration time. One conclusion is that for materials with high transmission attenuation but of moderate thickness, e.g. concrete, a radar frequency of 10 GHz seems reasonable. Various hand-held wall penetrating antenna concepts have been studied and a multi-channel wave-guide antenna filled with dielectrics has been found interesting. We have shown that such an antenna has good potential of functioning in a 2-D monopulse system, given that the filling material has the same permittivity as the wall material. The relative bandwidth will be more than 40% (7-10.6 GHz). Broadband array antennas for wall penetrating radar systems open the way for improved range resolution. Microstrip antennas possess several attractive properties, making them suitable for the considered application, e.g. the possibility to develop broadband array antennas with low profile and weight. From the point of view of cost it is furthermore advantageous that the antennas may be manufactured in a rational way with modern printed circuit board technology. Probably, the best solution for a comparatively simple and cheap system is to have a broad transmit lobe and a number of broad-lobe switched receiving antennas, or vice versa. A new interesting method to monitor objects in high-clutter environments, e.g. behind walls, has been studied, viz. time-reversal which is based on retransmitting a received wave-form "backwards" (time reversed) with a multi-channel antenna, thereby focusing on strong scatterers in the scene. Besides such self-focusing, the potential of the method for imaging, among other things, is interesting but the difficulties here form tasks for current research. A bilateral research co-operation between ONERA and FOI concerning wall penetration, among other items, started in 2008. Within this co-operation, wall-penetrating measurements have been performed of a moving person in a closed room. The project is represented in the NATO group SET-100 RTG056 "Sensing Through the Walls Technologies".