Design Of An Automatic Test System For Radar

The radar is used to achieve accurate positioning of the target, to help weaponsystems lock the target, then hit and destroy it. Therefore, the performance of radarswill directly affect the positioning accuracy on the target, and in turn affect theefficacy of the entire weapon system. This research focuses on the development ofan ATS for a radar, in order to achieve a detailed and comprehensive test for theradar during the development, production and maintenance process, which providesa strong guarantee of the reliability of the radar work.This paper analysises the testing requirements of a radar in detail, and providesthe overall program of ATS for radar based on PXI Bus platform. The entire systemconsists of a PXI chassis and embedded controllers, data acquisition card, adedicated serial communication card, the signal adapter combination, power supplycombination, self-test combination, target simulator, and the echo signal simulator.The ATS fulfills the power supply control and condition monitoring, the measure-ments for basic electrical parameters of the radar, synchronous485timing serialcommunication, dedicated asynchronous422serial communication, and ethernetcommunications based on both TCP and UDP, meeting the requirement for minia-turization of the test system.The design of the dedicated serial communication card and self-test combi-nation, which are all independently developed, is described detailed in this paper.The dedicated serial communication card fulfilles standard asynchronous422serialcommunication that achieves the control of target simulator, dedicated asyn-chronous422serial communication that simulates the communication between thetelemetry equipment and radar, and synchronous485timing serial communicationwhich simulates to control radar instead of the flight-control computer. All ofcommunications can work in the same time, which reduced the cost of the system.Self-test combination, which is based on the architecture of DSP and FPGA,simulates the workflow, test signals, and a variety of communications of radar, thatlays the foundation for a comprehensive selftest of the ATS. It is worth mentioning that the Ethernet communication interface is designed based on the Ethernetprotocol chip W5300with a short development cycle and low cost.The software of the ATS is developed on the LabWindows/CVI platform by thetechnology of VISA, ODBC and multi-threading, which mainly consists of testmanagement software, instrument driver software, manual test software andautomatic test software. The software is designed with hierarchical and modularmethord, meeting the requirements of the versatility and portability.The results of joint experiments shows that the ATS is capable to complete allthe tests of the radar at the present stage, satisfing the testing requirements of theradar.