Design of the Transceiver for a Wide-Range FMCW Radar Altimeter Based on an Optical Delay Line

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave(FMCW) radar altimeter with wide altitude range and low measurement errors. Wide altitude range is achieved by employing the optic delay in the transmitting path to reduce the dynamic range of measuring altitude. Transmitting power and receiver gain are also controlled to have the dynamic range of the received power be reduced. In addition, low measurement errors are obtained by improving the sweep linearity using the Direct Digital Synthesizer(DDS) and minimizing the phase noise employing the reference clock(Ref_CLK) as the offset frequency of the Phase Locked Loop(PLL).