Design Example: Coffee Can Radar System

The MIT OpenCourseware Coffee Can Radar project provides free lectures and plans for building a working DIY radar system. This basic homodyne radar system design is capable of Range, Doppler, and Synthetic Aperture imaging and can be built with off the shelf connectorized components that operate in the 2.4GHz open ISM bands.

This talk takes the original Radar System and analyze it with a true system tool so that a designer can easily look at metrics relevant to radar engineers. Different components for the transmitting power amplifier, receiving low noise amplifier, and the homodyne systems mixer are used in Visual System Simulator system tool to determine the effect on distance ranging, probability of detection, and velocity uncertainly.

Finally, an optimized system is presented that takes the original connectorized implementation and converts it to an all surface mount design with an integrated planar antenna. The new design embraces a full bits-to-beams implementation within Visual System Simulator and Microwave Office (AXIEM and Analyst software too) of the antenna as well as the board layout and circuit co-simulation with radar system metrics to reveal a successfully working design prototype prior to being built.

Presented by: Dr. Jim Carrol

To explore this design project further within AWR Design Environment, open example titled “CoffeeCanRadar_SMT_Redesign.”

Try AWR software for free:
https://www.awr.com/download-free-trial