A hardware prototype of sub-Nyquist radar with unknown pulses

In a conventional radar system, the hardware cost increases with the sampling rate of the receiver. Sub-Nyquist radar systems operate at lower sampling rates and hence reduce the hardware cost and complexity. A sub-Nyquist radar system uses the knowledge of the transmit pulse shape to determine the targets. However, the pulse shape is often distorted in practice and unknown to the receiver. An alternative sub-Nyquist radar system that uses multiple receiver was proposed that estimates the targets without knowledge of the pulse shape. In this demo, the authors build a hardware prototype to demonstrate the proposed multi-receiver sub-Nyquist radar. The proposed two-receiver system with an unknown pulse has comparable pre-forms to a conventional sub-Nyquist system is shown. This paper shows a hardware demonstration of sub-Nyquist sampling of finite-rate-of-innovation signals when the basic pulse shape is unknown. The results are particularly interesting in radar imaging, where the transmit pulse is distorted while propagation and unknown at the receiver.