What is FMCW Radar and why is it useful?

This video goes over range estimation with FMCW radar and gives a little insight into why you might want to use it over a traditional pulsed radar.

There are many more trade-offs between the two that I don't discuss here, but this should give you a basic understanding of the technology.

I'll use this as a basis for future videos on FMCW radar. There is a ton to cover and I'm excited to dive into those animations and explanations!

Who is this for?
Well, anyone interested in radar, but I did make a few assumptions about the viewer's background including a basic understanding of math and knowledge of what an electromagnetic wave is.

Some of the many resources I used when learning about this:
Jon Kraft's series on FMCW radar hardware and software (Analog Devices) (   / @jonkraft  )
Small and short range radar systems (book) (https://www.amazon.com/Short-Range-Pr...)
The phaser FMCW radar platform (https://ez.analog.com/ez-blogs/b/engi...)
Radar Basics: How to Build a 24 GHz FMCW Radar System - Alex Andrews (Analog Devices) (https://www.analog.com/en/resources/t...)
Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave Radar (FMCW Radar) - radartutorial.eu (https://www.radartutorial.eu/02.basic...)

Some of the caveats to the information presented in this video:
Pulsed radars often transmit more complex waveforms than a simple sine wave (e.g., pulse compression)
FMCW radars often also have some "off" time between chirps
FMCW radars will many times transmit a series of chirps then combine them in post-processing into a coherent processing interval (CPI)
See the next video on velocity estimation :)
Not all power is reflected from the target but it is instead scattered in many directions

All animations shown were created using Manim Community (https://docs.manim.community/en/stabl...) - a Python animation library written by 3Blue1Brown (   / @3blue1brown  ) and maintained by the community. Huge thanks to everyone working on this incredible project!

Code for the animations can be found on my GitHub: https://github.com/brunerm99/videos.

Errata:
I probably should have labeled the time shift from transmission to reception as t_{shift} and not t_{0} for clarity and parity with the upcoming video on the hardware implementation.
"Keyring" should be "keying"

#somepi #manim