Software Radar signal processing

Software infrastructure is a growing part of modern radio science systems. As part of developing a generic infrastructure for implementing Software Radar systems, we have developed a set of reusable signal processing components. These components are generic software based implementations for use on general purpose computing systems. The components allow for the implementation of signal processing chains for radio frequency signal reception, correlation based data processing, and cross-correlation based interferometry. The components have been used to implement the signal processing necessary for incoherent scatter radar signal reception and processing as part of the latest version of the Millstone Hill Data Acquisition System (MIDAS-W). Several hardware realizations with varying capabilities have been created, and these have been used successfully with different radars. We discuss the signal processing components in detail, describe the software patterns in which they are used, and show example data from the Millstone Hill, EISCAT Svalbard, and SOUSY Svalbard radars.