Microwave Photonics Broadband Doppler Velocity Simulator with High Spurious Suppression Ratio by Using Serrodyne Modulation

A Doppler velocity simulation method based on serrodyne modulation is proposed to achieve the frequency shift from hundred hertz to megahertz. One sub-phase modulation (PM) in a dual-parallel dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator loads a sawtooth signal to achieve a small frequency shift of the optical carrier. The other three sub-PMs implement carrier-suppressed double-band modulation of the RF signal. The RF signal is directly coupled from the receiving antenna to the modulator’s RF port without any electrical devices like a 90° hybrid, which ensures a broad operational bandwidth of the system. After filtering out one of the RF modulation sidebands by an optical filter, Doppler frequency shifting (DFS) is realized through frequency beating. The half-wave voltage of modulators rapidly decreases at low frequency shifts, leading to an increase in spurious signals. In order to improve the spurious suppression ratio (SSR) of DFS, a digital pre-distortion compensation based on the measured half-wave voltage is implemented in the frequency domain. Experimental results show that SSRs are larger than 35 dB when frequency shifts range from 0.1 kHz to 1 MHz. The RF operation bandwidth covers 2–40 GHz. The effectiveness of a Doppler velocity simulator is evaluated, and the simulation velocity error is less than 0.06 km/h. The proposed method has potential applications in both broadband electronic warfare and traffic metering applications.