ACTIVITY SHEET

Introduction to Radar Systems: Transmitters and Receivers, Parts 1 and 2

Follow the explanations Dr. Robert E. O’Donnell provides for each slide and do what is required.

Part 1 (Resource 1)
1. “Radar Block Diagram” Slide

1.1. What does the transmitter do with the signal produced by the waveform generator? Answer
in a simple sentence based on what you hear.
Answer: It amplifies the signal.
1.2. What is a duplexer, in one word? Answer in one word, based on what you hear.
Answer: switch
1.3. What is the function of a duplexer? (What does it do?) Find the simple sentence that
describes this function and transcribe it.
Answer: Whenever you see duplexer think switch, because we don’t want that very large
transmitter signal to go into the receiver.
Or: The switch (the duplexer) will isolate the transmitter from the receiver.

2. “Simplified Radar Transmitter/Receiver System Block Diagram” Slide

2.1. Listen to the professor’s explanations and fill in the following transcript:

You see that we've got a waveform generator, where we generate what’s a small signal and it's
generated (usually) at a lower frequency than we finally transmit, and it's converted up to a higher
frequency. But before we do that, we amplify the signal, filter it, and then we go out to the
duplexer – a switch that's… you'll see in a minute why that switch needs to be there in great detail
– and then all through the transmitter; the echo comes back where it's filtered and then we amplify
the signal, send it into the receiver, and then we digitize it into a signal that we can process and
detect the echoes of the targets.

2.2. Which are the low power subsections represented on the diagram?
Answer: filter, low noise amplifier, receiver and waveform generator.

3. “Radar Range Equation Revisited” Slide

3.1. What is the S/N ratio?

Answer: It means “signal to noise ratio” and it stands for how strong the target is relative
to the noise. (Don’t ask me what that means, I ain’t no engineer.)
3.2. What are the three main factors to consider when it comes to maximizing the signal to noise
ratio?
Answer: These are higher transmitted power, lower system losses and minimizing system
temperature. (Maybe that’s why American radars are better that Soviet ones from the same
generation, ‘cause they’ve got AC.)
4. “Power Amplification Process” and “Method to Obtain Higher Power” Slides
4.1. Why are different stages necessary?
Answer: Because there are limitations to the amount of amplification you can get
per stage and we want to cause the lowest possible noise and the minimum
distortion to the input signal. Moreover, there’s no single amplifier that can
possibly provide such an amplification.
4.2. Which are the two possible architectures presented in the video?
Answer: series and parallel
4.3. Fill in the following transcript of the description provided in the video as far as the second
architecture is concerned:

[…] or we could take a waveform amplifier (a driver amplifier) and then send that signal, divide it
up into a series of high power amplifiers, and then combine the output of these into it, with a
summing mechanism (an addition mechanism) and send the signal out the amplifier. So […] we
can increase the power by combining signals in parallel .

5. “Types of High Power Amplifiers” and “Average Power Output versus Frequency ”
Slides

5.1. Provide 3 examples of vacuum tube amplifiers.

Answer: klystrons, travelling wave tube (I’ve been unable to find a third type)
5.2. Which amplifier type is suitable for high power radars? What about low power radars?
Answer: We use vacuum tube amplifiers for high power radars and solid state
amplifiers for low power radars.

6. “MIT/LL Millstone Hill Radar” and “How Big are High Klystron Tubes?” Slides

6.1. What type of radar is the Millstone Hill Radar?

Answer: It’s a tube radar.
6.2. Split the following transcript of the description for the Millstone Hill Radar transmitter
room into sentences, add punctuation and correct errors where necessary:

There is a picture of the transmitter room, give you a size of the hugeness. The klystron on that is
used in this radar cost $400,000 per tube. It's built by Varian. It’s 7 feet tall. Here's the system
itself. There's a vacuum, the klystron, and there are coolant hoses because enormous power is
going through a quest it's not perfectly efficient so there's a certain amount of heat generated that
you've got to bleed off of the whole system would melt. This very large waveguide 200 feet of
waveguide goes from the transmitter out to the antenna. There's a 1 kilowatt peak power solid-
state driver amplifier there's a whole room that houses the power amplifier itself there's spare tube
here and all sorts of stuff. You can see this is big radar. It has a gain of 42 DB that's a gain of
10,000 with a low duty cycle 3% of the time, it can be on weights 600 pounds, 7 feet by a foot,
just to give you a physical size of the beast.

7. “Photograph of Traveling Wave Tubes” Slide

7.1. Split the following transcript of the traveling wave tubes into sentences, add punctuation
and correct errors where necessary:

There are other types of tubes called traveling-wave amplify t WT s traveling wave tubes. And
here are pictures of two of them they have also happened to be built by Varian, one at S band and
one at X band and let's just first look this S band traveling wave to its center. Frequency is 3.3
gigahertz SP and I'll remind you it's a wave length of ten centimeters and it has a band width of
400 megahertz and it has a peak power output of a hundred and sixty kilowatts with eight percent
duty cycle, again around 43 DB. About 20,000 is the gain and here four of them are stacked up
and run in parallel and that were built into an Epson transmitter. And with some of the associated
equipment this is eight feet tall four dimensions you can see they big tubes.

8. Based on the remainder of the recording under RESOURCE 1, do what is required.

8.1. Write down the example for a solid state transmitter provided in the video (the acronym).
Answer: RSTER
8.2. Write down the example for a solid state active phased array radar provided in the video
(the acronym).
Answer: PAVE PAWS
8.3. What does the Cape Cod PAVE PAWS radar do?
Answer: It does ballistic missile early warning.
8.4. What does PRI stand for? How is radar PRI defined?
Answer: It means pulse reception interval and it’s the interval of time between the
transmission of a signal and the receiving of the echo.

Now move on to the assignments to complete based on the second part of the lecture (Resource 2):

Part 2 (Resource 2)

9. “Simplified Functional Descriptions” Slide

What are the common features of a transmit chain (or “up chain”) and a receive chain (or “down
chain”)? There is one correct answer (a, b, c, or d).

a) waveform generation, amplification, up-conversion, filtering, antenna

b) amplification, filtering and frequency conversion
c) analog to digital conversion, amplification, down-conversion, filtering, antenna
d) waveform signal, analog to digital (A/D) conversion
B
10. “Frequency Conversion Concepts” Slide

10.1. According to Dr. Robert E. O’Donnell, a waveform generator consists of:

a) a waveform set, a local oscillator, an up converter, and a mixer

b) a waveform set, an up converter, and an L band
c) a waveform set, a local oscillator, an up converter and an L band
d) a waveform set, a local oscillator, and an upconverter (which is a mixer)
C
10.2. A receiver translates the received frequency to a lower frequency:
 a) by means of the dynamic range of an analogue to digital converter, which is higher at
low frequency
b) by putting a precise local oscillator signal into the mixer and taking out the difference
output
c) by means of the dynamic range of an analogue to digital converter, which is less
expensive at lower frequency
d) by putting a local oscillator signal into the mixer and taking out the sum of the two
frequencies
A
11. “Simplified System Block Diagram” Slide

11.1. What does HP A stand for on the diagram? How about the simple “A”?
Answer: High Power Amplifier. A stands for amplifier.
11.2. What does A/D stand for?
Answer: It stands for analogue to digital converter.

12. Transmitter and Receiver Architectures Slides

12.1. True or false? Mark each sentence T for “true” or F for “false”.
a) Dish radars are the simplest radar systems in terms of block diagram structure. T
b) Dish radars are multitarget radar systems. T
c) ALCOR, ALTAIR, TRADEX, MMW, MILLSTONE, the Haystack Auxiliary Radar
(HAX) are dish radar systems. T
d) Of the three radar antenna architectures presented in the video, the active array radar is
the only one that manages low signal loss. T
e) Of the three radar antenna architectures presented in the video, the active array radar
needs extra-cooling. T
f) Antenna inertia significantly affects all three architectures’ performances (scan rates).
F
g) Dish radars are an old technology and therefore, they are no longer in use. F
h) Phase shifters are a feature of passive array radars. T
i) A row/column feed (corporate feed) is a feature of active array radars. F
j) A corporate feed has high signal loss. T
k) Individual transmit-receive modules are a component of dish radar systems. F
l) The passive array radar is the most expensive of the three. T
m) The individual active T/R modules contain a low power section, a high power
amplifier, a duplexer, a receiver and a switching. T