Efficient Bistatic Radar Processing Using Subsampled FMCW Ramps

Bistatic radar places high demands on synchronization accuracy to ensure coherency in time, frequency and phase. The challenging synchronization requirements are circumvented by receiving the transmission signal on two paths and directly sampling the high-frequency signal without analog demodulation. In order to avoid large amounts of data and to enable sampling with slower ADCs, a concept is shown that allows subsampled frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) ramps to be evaluated without degradation of the performance. Bistatic radar measurements without any hardware synchronization are presented, demonstrating the coherent processing of up to 1024 times subsampled data without substantial loss in performance.