Signal Processing Technique for Spectrally RF Congested and Restricted Environments Using the US Army Research Laboratory Stepped-Frequency Ultra-Wideband Radar

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) recently designed and tested a new prototype radar, the Spectrally Agile Frequency-Incrementing Reconfigurable (SAFIRE) radar system, based on a stepped-frequency architecture to address challenges when operating under spectrally congested and spectrally restricted RF environments. SAFIRE is a vehicle-based, low-frequency, ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with frequencies spanning from 300 MHz to 2 GHz, where many frequency bands within this spectrum are either employed by other systems (congested RF environment) or prohibited (spectrally restricted RF environment).