And we don't need the dedicated room, which otherwise makes the radar tower veeery expensive. Because of this, we just don't need rotary couplers, and because of this, we don't have 50 meters of leaking waveguides which need to be pressurized with dry air, and because of this we don't need a dehumidifier and air conditioning and all that stuff. This is, like, not a common thing in radars, that usually occupy an entire room below the antenna.

The entire radar magically fits into a box that is mounted directly on the back of the antenna and everything (transmitter, receiver, computer) rotates, being supplied only 230VAC from the ground (and you work on the radar via SSH over wifi befause why not).

It allows us to transmit arbitrary signal, leading to an ultimate DSP nirvana like pulse compression, wifi avoidance, insane stagger schemes and everything.

Besides omg-I-don't-need-to-care-about-delicate-vacuum-tubes, this has a lot of not immediately obvious effects:

The power transmitter is a solid-state GaN pallet amplifier, because it's the 21st century and who wants to mess with magnetrons or god forbid klystrons.

This allows extremely rapid prototyping and kickstarted the project in a short timeframe with limited resources. The DAC/DAC is a COTS SDR and the real-time part is created from a few interconnected MCUs to avoid as much FPGA hacking as possible (like 4 lines of VHDL code were required), tagging the stream of samples from the SDR to allow the entire processing entirely in software without RTOS, on a standard Linux PC.

The entire signal-processing chain is as much software-defined as possible.

Several decisions were made leading to a drastic simplification of the design: After hitting limits of this technology, I decided to build my own radar from scratch. I was working on repurposing marine radars for storm tracking. Project showcase Weather radar (2019 - ongoing) I'm providing Google Translate links to at least partially compensate for it. Some of the outgoing links are unfortunately only available in Czech.

A more formal resume of my experience, education and skillsĪlso, I have a blog ( Google Translate), where I write about signal processing, software development and various other topics.

Smaller projects that I have contributed to.

I work in a startup that makes weather radars. I'm a developer (with strong sysadmin background) from Prague who enjoys working on challenging projects combining low-level software, hardware, radio waves and other high-end technology.

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