Advantages of Patriot's Impulse Radar System
The key to Patriot's Radar system is its ability to transmit
and receive pulses barely longer then single cycles at the
transmit frequency. The first waveform shown here is a pulse
generated by an earlier Patriot Design, based on "off the
shelf" antenna technology. The waveform on the bottom was
produced and received by Patriot's current Design.
The current Patriot antenna system produces a pulse at the
desired frequency with little leading or trailing noise. The
Patriot antenna system provides many advantages over
pulse-based systems.
Patriot originally developed the impulse radar system to allow
time domain processing in Patriot's GPR systems. Because the
impulse is extremely short (3 nanoseconds), the time to return
can be used to gauge the distance traveled by the pulse.
Furthermore, the transmit and receive antenna's are very
directional, eliminating much of the multipath components of
the return signal.
The short pulse combined with the directional transmit and
receive to provide us with a number of important advantages:
- Very low average power during transmission
- Low interference from other transmitters
- Transmission invisible to conventional receivers
- High bandwidth digital data transmission possible
- Difficult detection by other impulse receivers
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