A Miniaturization Harmonic Radar Tag for Insect Tracking Application

Harmonic radar is a special radar system that has been used in insect tracking in recent years due to its excellent anti-clutter capability. Generally, a harmonic radar consists of a radar transceiver and a specially designed harmonic tag. However, tag tend to become entangled with vegetation in insect tracking experiments. This paper proposes a low-loss and miniaturized passive tag design method. We introduce a foldable structure in antenna design to achieve better tag miniaturization under unified frequency operation. The results using both simulated and real data demonstrate that remarkable improvements in size of tags, gain of tags, and echo signal strengthens of tags within our proposed method on the passive tag. The effectiveness of the method is verified by the results of harmonic radar illuminate tag.