Abstract The airborne circular synthetic aperture radar (CSAR) can be used for the continuous and daylight independent surveillance. In case of small flying platforms, it is attractive to use a broadband frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar and to transmit the sensor data to a ground station inside the measurement area for CSAR signal processing to save on-board resources. Thus, a joint FMCW radar and wireless communication system is needed. We propose and investigate frequency division multiplex (FDM) of broadband FMCW radar and single-carrier quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) communication using a single high power amplifier (HPA) for saving weight, size, power consumption and costs. Because of the HPA characteristics it is necessary to insert a frequency gap between the broadband linear chirp and the communication bandwidth. In case of an example scenario, the increase in overall bandwidth is only around 2.5 % of the radar bandwidth at 500 m flight altitude. It is shown that the transmit power of the communication part can be reduced to 13.4 dBm compared to the radar part with 30 dBm for maximal 500 m altitude. This enables power balancing for reducing intermodulation products of the HPA. Therefore, the reduction of the overall bandwidth by using a 70 % smaller frequency gap between the two frequency bands is possible. By using this power balancing the spectral efficiency is increased from 0.67 bps/Hz to 1.03 bps/Hz, but the power efficiency of the HPA is decreased by only 2.41 %. Therefore, it shows better performance for such applications than the linearity-hungry orthogonal FDM technique.
Johannes et al. (Wed,) studied this question.