A Study on Analysis of Phase Noise Effects in a FM-CW Radar System

It is necessary to estimate the Doppler spectrum for each range cell for the extraction of useful information from the return echoes in radar systems used for the remote sensing purpose such as detection of moving targets and weather surveillance. The signal amplitude in the beat frequency band is the important parameter in the detection and tracking of targets. However, strong clutter echoes do exist in most radar operation environments and the system phase noise spreads both the clutter and signal echoes of the target. In this paper, the effects of this system phase noise are analyzed concerning the clutter and the signal beat spectrum. It is shown that the separation capability of adjacent beat signal depends on the degree of spread in the clutter and beat signal caused by the radar system phase noise