Commensal radar: Range-Doppler processing using a recursive DFT

Abstract

Commensal radar [1] is an attractive solution to low-cost air-traffic surveillance. This paper proposes an alternative approach using a recursive Fourier transform for Doppler processing for computing amplitude-range-Doppler (ARD) data. At present, the full FFT is utilsed, however, at the cost of unnecessary channel decomposition, excess memory, and high-overhead for the required sampling window lasting 1-4s. This work proposes the use of a recursive Fourier technique which allows select channels to be computed, introduces significant memory savings, and offers very fine time frequency decomposition.