Decompression-Based Receiver Design for Radar Ice Sounding Applications

• Main Authors: Sarkar, Utsa Dey, Kaundinya, Shravan, Taylor, Lee, Rodriguez-Morales, Fernando, Paden, John
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: decompression; Dynamic range; Limiting; Neural networks; Radar receiver; radar sounding; radioglaciology; Receivers; Sensitivity; Signal generators; Training; UHF; VHF
• ISSN: 2153-7003
• DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS52108.2023.10282590

This work describes the design and development of a radar receiver with a large dynamic range by means of carefully designed compression. The receiver is designed for ice sounding applications on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and is designed to be usable over a large frequency range (VHF and UHF) and with multiple analog-to-digital converters with only minor modifications. We present the receiver design, in which we have implemented an RF-power limiting feature so that the output power is monotonically increasing with respect to the input power over a large dynamic range. This allows the receiver to operate in the non-linear region to compress the high-power returns into the dynamic range of the analog to digital converter while still achieving good sensitivity (low noise figure) for low power signals. We discuss design considerations, hardware description, initial lab test results, the architecture of the design and results from recent field deployments. Lastly, we discuss the future work on the decompression mechanism to recover the uncompressed signals.