Coherent collocated MIMO radar is an emerging technology from which is expected several benefits since digital and adaptive beamforming are available at both transmit and receive sides. A large number of papers are dealing with theoretical analysis of those benefits. Nevertheless, few experimental performance assessments of those benefits have been reported. During the last few years, ONERA has built a powerful and versatile surface radar testbed named HYCAM. Its design included a MIMO mode in order to test the different classes of waveforms in real conditions (hardware defaults, clutter characteristics) which can hardly be modeled with accuracy. After a recall of the MIMO processing principles, this paper sums up the benefits and drawbacks that are expected from this technology and the need of experimentation to verify those expectations. Then we will present ONERA's HYCAM MIMO testbed and first results of MIMO trials using this system as well. Those experimental results will be linked to a more general discussion on impacts of hardware defaults on MIMO radar waveforms performances.

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MIMO radar is a promising concept as demonstrated by many studies, especially for possible improvements in term of target detection and localization. Moreover, the transmission of orthogonal waveforms opens the door to more flexibility for system control and calibration, by making possible to transfer radar functions to the digital domain. Nevertheless, MIMO radar considerations have rarely been performed with real signals. At ONERA, a collocated MIMO-capable radar testbed has been specially designed and installed to perform experiments in realworld conditions. In this paper, we explain first how MIMO radar can bring more flexibility and performance for system control and calibration. In a second part, we introduce the MIMO radar testbed and the experiments we did with it, in a context of transmitter phase miscalibration. Then, we describe our method for the a posteriori calibration of transmission antenna phases. This method digitally aligns the phases of the transmitters directly in the received signal, in the case the transmitters are originally not fully calibrated, by choice or incidentally. Eventually, we present the results of this method applied to the experimental data.