Multi-beam digital antenna for radar, communications, and UAV tracking based on off-the-shelf wireless technologies

• Main Author: Gezer, Berat Levent
• Other Authors: Jenn, David C.
• Format: Others
• Published: Monterey California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Subjects: Systems engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/2583

The state-of-art technologies keep generating new ways of improving on the performance of the old systems. Array antennas, one of the continuously improving technologies, brought many benefits to our life. The superiorities of array antennas remove the disadvantages of the old technology radars such as great sidelobes, vulnerability to the jammers, and degradation effect of the clutter. Array antennas find many applications on different areas. Today, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have begun to be seen in our life more often than before. UAVs prevent pilot loss of life. They carry out a variety of military and civilian missions such as surveillance and reconnaissance, target recognition, battle damage assessment, EW, search and rescue, and traffic monitoring. An important use of the UAVs is troop support, carrying out reconnaissance and surveillance missions, which requires maintaining a data-link with troops in order to send any data collected, such as video images, or audio. During operations it is necessary to continuously maintain a data and control link with the operator. This requires the ground station antenna to track the UAV so the antenna beam is pointed properly. The purpose of this research is to design and build an array to angle-track a UAV and, eventually, to accomplish the data transfer from the UAV to the ground station.