The main goal of this research is to study the effect of hardware design choices at the signal-level of an end-to-end radar system. An implementation of waveform diversity concepts, or the use of various waveforms in both transmit and receive is employed. An end-to-end Matlab simulation is developed such that the system impulse response to hardware imperfections and waveform parameters such as bandwidth and frequency channel spacing can be analyzed. Multiple frequency channels as well as multiple pulses are also considered in the research.
All hardware components are nonlinear to some degree. The nonlinearities of the hardware give rise to unwanted spectral components in the output. Therefore, models that simulate the behavior of both ideal and non-ideal hardware components are developed. A user friendly interface is developed in which each hardware component can be interchanged between the ideal and non-ideal model. In studying both the system impulse response to ideal components as well as the response to non-ideal components, the impact of the nonlinearities on cross-correlation signal detection and range-Doppler can be analyzed.