A Photonics Radar with Remoting Antenna based on Photonic Assisted Signal Generation and Stretch Processing

A photonics-based broadband radar with remoting antennas is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A linearly-frequency-modulated (LFM) signal is generated by microwave photonic frequency quadrupling in central office and transmitted to a remote antenna unit by employing the radio-over-fiber (ROF) technology. In antenna unit, the photonic LFM signal is split into two branches. Light signal in one branch is converted to RF and emitted out. Light signal in the other branch is fed into a dual polarization parallel topological photonic mixer to perform the operation of de-chirp on receive. A Ku-band photonics-based radar with a bandwidth of 2 GHz is demonstrated. An inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging experiment is carried out to verify the performance of the system.