EEC's Next Generation X-band Polarimetric Weather Radar: Solid-State Ranger Series

New, innovative X-band weather radar systems have recently attracted interest in both the research and industrial communities alike. This is primarily due to the inherently lower cost and, the ability to construct networks providing improved detection of the lower region of the atmosphere over conventionally spaced C- or S-band radars. Such networks could effectively enhance the capability of weather detection, prediction, and decision support. To further this effort, the U.S. Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of Atmosphere (CASA) center has been researching networks constructed with small, X-band weather radars utilizing the innovative Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing (DCAS) concept.

As one of world leading weather radar manufacturers, Enterprise Electronics Corporation (EEC) has been innovating their next generation weather radar with low power, low cost, and high reliability solid-state transmitter design. Recently EEC has successfully developed the novel X-band solid-state polarimetric weather radar—Ranger series. The Ranger system features dual-polarity accuracy, solid-state transmitters, and low power consumption, all in one affordable and portable unit. Currently Ranger-X1 (dual-100W transmitter) and X5 (dual-500W transmitter) systems have been delivered to several research/commercial agencies worldwide.

The current presentation introduces the novel hardware design and signal processing of the Ranger series, including the implementation of pulse compression techniques with advanced waveform design. The performance of Ranger is demonstrated with a Ranger-X1 system recently deployed in the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) area and serving as a portion of CASA DFW radar testbed network.