Study Of MF Rader Signal Sampling-processing System And Wind Retrievals

The MF radar is used to investigate wind and electron densities from 60 to 100km in the near space. It is a very important ground-based instrument for the study of middle and upper atmosphere. The paper focuses on the study of MF sampling-processing system and wind retrievals.The signal sampling-processing system is an important part of MF radar system. It converts the return signals from analog to digital and preprocesses those signals. The designed system is mainly composed of FPGA and DSP. The DSP processor is used to preprocess the radar signal, including the average in one range and coherent integration in a radar burst. The FPGA is used to control the communication between DSP and FIFOs memory and USB controller. The system and experiments were depicted in this paper.The full correlation analysis is the mainly used method to get wind velocity for MF radar with the space antenna mode, which was introduced in details in this paper. Based on the antenna configuration of Langfang MF radar, the FCA algorithms with 3 antenna and 4 antenna called FCA-3A and FCA-4A respectively, were developed. The rejection criteria for FCA algorithm were also discussed and given here. The algorithms were applied in the processing of the raw data of Langfang MF radar to compute wind velocity. The wind results were compared with those calculated by the ATRAD FCA software which was used in many MF radar sites in the world and it was shown that they are consistent with each other. The wind velocities estimated with the FCA-3A method agreed very well with those with the FCA-4A method. Results show that the algorithms of FCA-3A and FCA-4A are reliable for Langfang MF radar data processing.