Bygg ditt eget radarsystem, projektkurs

Welcome to the EK2370 "Build your own radar system project course"!

This is a hands-on project course for MSc students, in which the students learn about modern radar systems and lean how to build radar hardware and how to implement basic radar signal processing. The course has both a hardware and a software oriented phase.

Course content:

1. introductory lectures where students learn about:
   • radar sensors and radar systems, as well as modern radar applications including autonomous driving, gesture detection, medical radar, environmental sensing
   • basic radar signal waveforms
   • basics of radar signal processing
   • hardware blocks and RF components for radar systems, with an introduction to the most important RF components such as mixers, power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, VCO, radar antennas for different frequency bands
   • software-defined radio for radar
2. project work in two sequential blocks building two radar systems:
   1. a hardware oriented part: the students build a radar front end at 2.4 GHz, using RF components (VCO, PA, mixer, coupler) and base-band signal processing components (sawtooth generator, active bandpass filters), and commercial WIFI Rx and Tx antennas. The low-frequency receive signal is fed into a laptop microphone port. The signal processing is done in MATLAB. Radar waveforms investigated are CW and FMCW.
   2. a software oriented part: the students use a software-defined radar platform (SDR), replacing all the hardware above, and connect it to 3D-printed horn antennas to build a compact 5.8 GHz radar system. An external power amplifier is optional. Signal processing is done in the SDR software and in MATLAB. Any suitable radar waveforms can be investigated.
3. one-day industrial study visit to SAAB, radar systems department, with lectures given by SAAB employees and a demonstration of a high end radar system.

The students work in teams of 3 students. There are weekly progress review meetings. The course is given every year in autumn, period 1 (HT-P1). The course participation is currently limited to 25 students. Course assessment, besides the project work, is based on a final presentation, a final report, and online assessment tasks (online quizzes during the lecture phase).

Further course information and all course material is on the KTH CANVAS platform.