PRISM Updates: Bistatic radar will partially counteract the specular effect...

Speaker: John Paden, graduate student, EECS, University of Kansas, 2002.

Modified Part One Transcript: Our radar will be capable of operating in monostatic mode or bistatic mode. Most radars that you hear about operate in monostatic mode. People don't even mention that it is monostatic radar because it is so common. The reason bistatic mode is so rare is that it makes things much more difficult. And that is one of the things that makes our radar special, we are going to be using that to our advantage. It makes the system more complex, but we are going to get something from the complexity.

Modified Part Two Transcript: One of the main differences between monostatic and bistatic radar is that in monostatic radar your transmitter and receiver are in the same position. This allows two different ways for the data to be sent from the transmitter to the receiver. One information path is through the transmitted wave form being reflected off whatever you are looking at and coming back to the receiver. This path of the reflection is called the measurement path. The other information path is through a cable linking the transmitter and the receiver together. This cable makes it very easy to synchronize the transmitter and the receiver with each other. In the case of bistatic radar, the transmitter and receiver are quite a distance apart, so you can't just put a cable between them. The synchronization has to occur only through the measurement path. You are actually trying to synchronize from the information that you have gleaned from the received signal, so it's quite a bit more difficult.