Development Of 3D Display System For HF Radar

Radar display terminal,which is used to visually present the information contained in the radar echo signal, plays an important role in the radar system. In HF (High Frequency) radar, the targets detected based on the spectrum processed by the two-dimension FFT are peak-like, which makes the operator distinguish them from the clutter and background noise easiler in the 3D (three-dimension) display than the 2D. Moreover, the inner relation among the targets may be exhibited more sufficiently by the 3D display. So it is nessesory to develop the 3D radar display system.The 3D radar display system described in this paper is a part of the HF radar simulation platform, which provides the function of 3D display for the simulation platform. According to the requirement of the platform, the display system is divided into three basic modules: the display module, the control module and the communication module. Through these modules, the display system can link and cooperate with the platform steadly and synchronously.Considering the compatibility with the platform, the programming tool used here is Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 and the 3D tool is OpenGL API. For the convenience of usage, the graphic operations are similar with those in Matlab, as Matlab is applied popularly in engineering. During the design of the system, the object-oriented technology and UML (Unified Modeling Language) are applied to ensure the quality and reliability, meanwhile, the development cycle is shortened.Meanwhile, in order to satisfy various requirements of research, teaching and verification, the system provide all kinds of modes of 3D display, for example, the range-velocity display mode, the range-direction display mode, the velocity-direction display mode, single/multiple targets'track display mode, single/multiple graph display mode, clutter-hidden display mode, single/multiple group data display mode and so on.This display system overcomes the shortcoming of the existing radar platform in 3D display. The testing results with the platform prove that the stability and the performance of the 3D display system can meet the demands.