FMCW Radar Design With AWR VSS Tool

[strahd_von_zarovich]

Hi, i want to design a FMCW radar on AWR VSS tool for rocket(my assignment project). My requirements are like below. I want to know if we can do this on VSS ? And i don't know what to place after TX antenna . Do i have to connect TX antenna and RX antenna directly or do we need another thing to represent air or something ? Can i find answers for the questions below , using VSS? Thanks in advance.

Output Power : Max.0.3 Watt
Antenna Gain : Max. 10 dBi
Receiver Noise Figure: Max.3 dB
Range Resolution : ± 1 metre
Rocket Speed : 300 m/s
Center Frequency : Ku band
Targets RCS (Radar Cross Section): 1 m2

Using these parameters , find received signal power(dBm), SNR(signal-to-noise ratio), sampling frequency . System power consumption must be lower than 10Watt.

 

[FvM]

Asking google for "awr vss fmcw" suggests this has been done before.

And i don't know what to place after TX antenna . Do i have to connect TX antenna and RX antenna directly or do we need another thing to represent air or something ?

Shouldn't you have something representing radar echos with respective time-of-flight? A transmission line with attenuator can do for the static case. But you need to model also the speed difference, doppler shift and varying time-of-flight.

 

[volker@muehlhaus]

For the simplest case, with constant distance, the path between transmit and receive antenna can be described by a lossy transmission line with k=1, as FvM said. Insertion loss from Frijs equation, radar cross section and 2 * antenna gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friis_transmission_equation
For a more realistic case, there would be some crosstalk between the antennas.

I'm surprised why FMCW is used for a moving device. Both distance and speed (doppler shift) will cause a frequency shift of the IF signal.