Investigation on Ranging of the Continuous Microwave Radar Based on Amplitude Modulation

In order to meet the needs of high speed and real-time, all-weather, high-precision and large-scale ranging, the method of continuous microwave radar with amplitude modulation is proposed. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of the main microwave radar ranging methods, the mathematical relationships among the modulation frequency, measurement range and its accuracy are deeply discussed in the method, in which the low single frequency signal modulated on high frequency carrier signal is adopted to get large-scale ranging and also the time-measurement technology with high precision is used to achieve high precision and high speed ranging. Finally, the experimental radar system is set up by the mixer and the time-measurement chip TDC-GP2 etc. The experiments of the phase difference measurement unit based on TDC-GP2 show its accuracy is2.7110-4degrees. When the frequency of carrier signal is 2.4 GHz and that of modulation signal is 150 kHz, the experimental results under the distance from 3.0～4.1 m verify the effectiveness that the radar system could achieve large-scale ranging of 1000 m, and show that the ranging accuracy is 0.0187 m of distance of 3.0 m. Moreover, the average ranging time for single measuring point is about 0.02～0.03 s.