Experimental Assessment of Tandem-Hopped Radar and Communications (THoRaCs)

A dual-function radar/communication emission scheme was recently developed in which undistorted information-bearing OFDM subcarriers are embedded into the constant amplitude and spectrally well-contained structure of FM noise radar waveforms via a two-stage optimization process. This power-efficient formulation is amenable to high-power amplification on transmit and subsequent demodulation of the embedded communication symbols through standard OFDM receive processing. Here the individual attributes of the emission are experimentally evaluated through free-space transmission followed by capture of the reflected radar echoes along with separate capture and demodulation by a communication receiver.