Development of an FMCW Radar Altimeter Simulator Using Optical Delay Lines

This paper presents the design method of an FMCW(frequency-modulated continuous-wave) altitude simulator which generates propagation delay signals according to target distances to test the radar altimeter. To improve the conventional RF method for creating delay signals, the simulator is designed by the RF-optics-RF method using optical delay lines. In addition, it is designed to simulate the Doppler shift and jamming that may occur in actual flight environment. In order to evaluate the performance of the developed simulator, the integration tests have been conducted with the radar altimeter. Through the test, we successfully verified the performance of the simulator.