Design of microcontroller based generic radar controller

Abstract

Increasingly radar stations contain multiple radar systems, each individually controlled. Non-standard control requires that a user of multiple systems learn each system separately. Additionally, multiple radar controllers make coordination of multiple systems difficult. The goal of this thesis is to design a generic radar controller that can be used to operate any pulsed radar system or multiple radar systems simultaneously. The Generic Radar Controller attempts to meet and improve upon the specifications of a previous radar controller and collapse its rack-mounted system into a single PC card. The University of Alaska Generic Radar Controller (UAF-GRC) is a microcontroller based PC card with a minimum of 16 control channels. Each channel can be individually programmed to provide pulses of 400 ns duration up to several milliseconds and variable pulse repetition intervals with a timing resolution of 10 ns. The hardware and software issues that appeared during the design phase are discussed in the thesis. The thesis concludes with improvements of UAF-GRC over the previous radar controller.