Design and Implementation of a Spread Spectrum Based Radar Altimeter

Abstract

Conventional radar altimeter systems such as Pulsed or Frequency modulated continuous wave (FM CW) have limitations on measurable range and security. In this paper, we propose a Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) based radar altimeter that offers good resolution and low probability of intercept. We carried out MATLAB simulations of the system and verified the results with a scaled down prototype model. Various system performance measures including Bit error rate (BER) were computed and compared with the theoretical results.