Near-infrared, visible, and ultraviolet lidar echo emulator

Abstract

A compact and cost effective NIR-VIS-UV lidar echo emulator (LEE) was designed and manufactured as a compact breadboard. The LEE is an application specific optical pulse shaper delivering a short lidar return (echo) in the ns range overlapped with a long lidar return in the µs range with a repetition rate from 100 Hz – 500 Hz. The short echo power levels are in the range from 0.2–200 nW, whereas the long echo powers from 0.1–25 pW. The coarse power tuning between the two kind of echoes is done using variable attenuators. LEE provides three operation modes: short echo, long echo, or both echoes overlapped. In the overlapping mode, the power difference between the echoes exceeds 60 dB.