Microwave Photonic Bistatic Radar for Real-Time and High-Resolution Imaging

A microwave photonic bistatic radar system with spatially separated transmitter and receiver is proposed. The transmitter generates a broadband linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal with the assistance of photonic frequency multiplication technique, and the radar echoes are de-chirped with photonic balanced in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) de-chirping technique in the receiver. The reference optical signal is transferred from the transmitter to the receiver by optical fiber. Experimentally, a K-band microwave photonic bistatic radar with an instantaneous bandwidth of 8 GHz is demonstrated. A set of contrast experiments are also carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed system. Furthermore, a bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging experiment is conducted to confirm the real-time and high-resolution imaging capability of the proposed radar system.