I've been digging through the posts here and some research on my own to see what's available to a radar sensor experimenter. Most of these would still need a backend baseband processor to work. However, they all also would have similar functionality. I'm curious what others have tried/looked into for their UAVs and UGV's.
2.4 GHz: The Tin Can Radar project. 80MHz of bandwidth and teaches everyone how to do SAR. It'll probably also kill a lot of up and downlinks if you're constantly sweeping the entire ISM band there. Also big, bulky, and won't fit on your normal UAV.
5.8GHz: Yup, again, more Tin Can Radar related systems. The Radarduino is slowly heading toward reality. Again, size and bulk.
10GHz: So, I'm starting to experiment in this range. This has traditionally been the realm of the old police band Gunnplexer and hamfest components. However, the DROPlexer (PDF) has shown that there may be 3MHz of bandwidth in the unmodified modules. You're not going to see anything but the ground with that kind of bandwidth... which makes it a good candidate for primary or backup radar altimeter. I find that amusing as that was the original use for FMCW radar setups.
24GHz: Now we're getting smaller and lighter yet. There's a fair bit of automotive radar hardware here. I've found a vendor in China (no english website) who sells complete RF front end modules of various capability (doppler only, single channel, i/q channel, multi recieving channel) that I'm trying to figure out how to get a few of. However, these have the full 250MHz bandwidth available, so may see those smaller targets. They're also phasing (or have phased) this out in the automotiive market due to interference with certain weather and geo-satellite sensors. There's also 22-29GHz uwb radars that are meant as secondary sensors on the automotive market, but again I haven't found any real information or availability.
77GHz: The new automotive standard. Other than auto phased arrays direct from auto component vendors (Delphi for example), there's not much else I've found. Someone mentioned they got one for a UGV project for around $1000, but I also suspect that was a discount for a university. Still, as this becomes common, I place most of my trust in getting something useful for SAR and airborne sensing here at sometime in the future, although directly using them appears to be currently not an option. Or at least something cheap enough to tear down and rebuild the back end processing.
122GHz: Something of an up and comer. We saw the SUCESS project back in 2012. Apparently there are engineering samples now. And QuadNav's doing a Kickstarter in the near future. Looking at the board pictures, they're using the Silicon Radar ICs with separate ADC and DAC ICs and the back end being done by a PIC32MX processor. It looks like the design has done its homework, but real details are sparse. No comment on validity of product yet, as I found it while trying to see if there was a source for those Silicon Radar chips.
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