Airborne Wide Band Coherent Radar For Ice Thickness Measurement

A prototype of an airborne wide band coherent radar has been accomplished which can be used for polar ice thickness measurement. The system uses pulse compression and coherent integration techniques and works at the VHF band. Using different transmit power, the radar can operate in both surface-based and airborne applications. The chirp waveform generator was designed by using a Direct digital synthesizer (DDS). A dual-channel receiver was introduced for better performance on the return signals of different layers. Surface-based experiments were done to test the system performace.