Re: GNU Radio for Radar Applications

[Marcus Müller]

100% agreement from my side! Note that in high-bandwidth radar applications, 
the IF often
gets sampled as I/Q, sometimes it's even the beat frequency signal (!), 
depending on the
physical radar architecture.

Jim is 100% spot on: anything that you can sample (i.e. anything that's 
sufficiently
band-limited for your ADC), you can process in GNU Radio. Whether  that can 
happen at the
rate your samples get produced by the ADC, or it needs to happen on offline 
(i.e.
recorded) data, that's a different question (and doesn't really change much, I 
guess, in
your use case).

That's why Martin once started the gr-radar project; I haven't properly been 
maintaining
it (sorry!), but it is a very handy collection of radar algorithms and -methods:
https://github.com/kit-cel/gr-radar

A bit in the spirit of that, David Winter lately implemented a OFDM radar 
system based on
GNU Radio and an Analog Devices IC he worked with in his internship:

https://events.gnuradio.org/event/8/contributions/102/attachments/48/89/GRCON%202021%20Winter.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaRgx5ehdOw

Just so you get a feeling for how things might look like :)

Best regards,
Marcus

PS: final theses about Radar are fun. You risk an interesting career in signal
processing/SDR, however, so tread with care.

On 21.10.21 17:22, Jim Melton wrote:
> Kenneth,
> 
> Gig ‘em!
> 
> GNU Radio is designed to start with I/Q and perform in software all the steps 
> that you would have done in hardware. So in that respect it is a good fit. 
> 
> Now, I’m a SW guy and the RF domain still makes my head hurt, but I suspect 
> that digitizing and processing 77 GHz (!!) is computationally intractable. If 
> your I/Q is IF and your sample rate is reasonable, then it is feasible. 
> 
> Also I have no experience with the TX side, but others do. 
> 
> For algorithm development using recorded data I think you’ll be pleased. 
> 
> Jim Melton, BQ ‘82
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Oct 21, 2021, at 8:48 AM, Kenneth Kruse <kenkruse@tamu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> My name is Kenneth Kruse and I am in the second half of my Electrical 
>> Engineering Senior Design class at Texas A&M University. We are trying to 
>> implement TI mmWave Radar in our project, but we lack the knowledge of how 
>> to read and process raw I/Q data (as the boards for processing from TI are 
>> expensive). Is GNU Radio a good platform for this project with 77 GHz radar 
>> that sends chirps? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks and God bless,
>> K. Kruse
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