Full Field-of-View Imaging for SuperDARN Radars

Conventional SuperDARN radars sequentially step through a series of narrow beams to observe a wide region of the ionosphere. New capabilities implemented with the Borealis digital radar system (https://borealis.readthedocs.io/) have opened the possibilities for improving the conventional scanning mode of operation. Digitally controlled, non-linear antenna phasing can be used to transmit high-power signals across the entire field-of-view (FOV) simultaneously, increasing the sampling rate and the synchrony of the observations. A genetic algorithm was used to find phases with minimum ripple across the FOV for common SuperDARN frequencies and varying number of transmit antennas. Results show that transmitting a wide beam with 8 or 16 antennas provides similar range coverage to conventional 16-antenna narrow beam patterns but at a 16-fold increase in sampling rate of the FOV.