Build Your Own Drone Tracking Radar: Part 1 

finally a radar DIY that isn't actually a sonar

This guy is so professional, watching his videos feels like speed running the telecommunications bachelor, thank you so much for explaining everything with this clarity, I'm looking forward to see this series 🎉

For quite a bit of the 1970s I worked in Marine Electronics, specializing in radar, gyro compasses, auto pilots, and telecommunications. I worked for Raytheon as a field engineer working on their commercial anti-collision radar. Some interesting radars I worked on were a Soviet S and X band radar where the S band wave guide and the x band wave guide were constructed like a coaxial cable - one inside the other. The slotted waveguide antenns were in the same scanner as a result. It was about 75' between the TR unit and the scanner and there were a lot of elbows in the wave guide along the route. Water was a serious problem and keeping them sealed was problematic. But my favorite radar was a hand-help chirp radar made by Whistler eponymously named Whistler Radar. It used headphones to listen to the beat frequency of the sent/received fm pulse. One curiousity is when aimed at a passing yacht one could here the vibrations of othe engine and stereo systems. These sounds vibrated the hull of the boat which modulated the radar echo (cw as you might expect) and speech was clearly understandable. Here and there in the internet are a few references to the Whistler Radar which was strapped on like an accordian and about the same size, head phones were donned, and targets were found to learn what the different sounds represented by visual objects, moving and stationary. I nearly got one recently on Ebay but it sold just hours before I saw it.

This is gold. No unnecessary stuff. the SNR of these videos is just too damn high. love it. thank you so much. I wish your videos reaches to all the aspiring communication engineers

Slick! I'm a retired ET who maintained the first phased array military RADAR SPS 32 on Enterprise back in the 70's. The electronics for each panel occupied (I think) 3 units full of control circuits, 4'X4'X7' tall, one with a single 8-bit register to run the phase shifting function. And to see such a FANTASTIC handheld device demonstrated so flawlessly is simply delightful. I'm going to make one to see how low those bloody helicopters are flying! Cheers!

Way back in the '60's in school we built a simple doppler radar. We used cans similar to what you are doing. Back then we used a klystron to generate the microwave signal, with what was called a hybrid junction to provide the detector and mixer. In the '80's I would have used a Gunn plexor to generate the microwave and do the mixing. I remember the term "radar mile," the time it took for a radar signal to leave the transmitter, reflect from an object a mile away, and return. My memory says about 63 microseconds, but I'm probably wrong, it's been many years. I'll have to follow your videos, thanks for sharing. Jim H.

This content makes me wish my dad were still around these days, he loved tinkering with radio tech.

The room and the video itself seems like a 90s TV worshop show... I love it!!!!

Wow... It was my childhood dream to learn and build RF electronics... Radar, radios etc... Thanks a lot for making this series

Fantastic work, Jon. The series is off to an auspicious start!

Fascinating series. Love the idea of starting simple and building to more complex experiments using a common base of hardware. It was the reference to Phaser, or phase-array antenna that got my attention on seeing the reference to this video. Watched a couple of prior videos, and am subscribed, ready to follow along.

I have always been fascinated by phase array technology. Very cool.

This looks quite interesting. I'm looking forward to your upcoming videos in the series

Nice work. I appreciate you applying your industry experience in explaining why you selected the components you did. Would not have thought to take an off the shelf SDR and modify the signal path! Can’t wait to see the rest of the series.

Fantastic. Subscribed. I am in the sports simulation space and have been working for a little while with vision based ball tracking systems. I know very little about radar but I always wanted to see if I could build something to track short range ball flight. Looking forward to this series!

Awesome! I can hardly wait for the rest of the series 😁 Thanks 👍

your contribution is that you want to learn. Thank you. My dad was an Air Force JTAC/TACP and he tried to explain this to me but I didn't get it till I watched you learn and teach it.

Excellent content. Appreciated all the work that went into preparing this. Looking forward to the series.

I am looking forward to seeing this series evolve. Great job!

As a radar guy, (I have many many radars) look forward to the rest of the series

Fantastic content mate. Been waiting for something like this. Your facilitation style and content presentation is top notch. Keep it up!

Very interested, thank you for series! I've enjoyed CW only radars for many years, but ready to move on in experiments.

very excited for this series - thank you for the time and effort put into these.

glad you're back! looking forward to the rest of the series!

Analog Devices have some amazing engineers. It's always a pleasure to work with their products.

Great content Jon, Being a chip designer myself, I find it very informative to follow your videos I will be following this video series and will try to get the hardware as well

For a while I couldn't follow your videos. john, great job! Everything you provide in your videos is excellent material, especially for students of relevant specialties. Thanks very much!

Thank you so much for taking on this material in an approachable, hands-on manner. I've been trying to use a 900 MHz radar to ranging on amateur rockets, and I'm hoping to apply these concepts!

Perfect! Since a few months back I'm having a phased array radar project in my head and on my bench - for detecting small drones! In addition I have acoustic profiling on my mind... 😉

This video was very good, it gave a presentation on the main aspects of radar systems. With practical examples from the most accessible to the most complex available for students and researchers. I just have to thank for your contribution.

Nice Jon - I work with a few drone radar companies. this came up in my feed. enjoying watching you building this from ground up.

I served on a SAM site for quite some time so PAR/CW systems are not unknown to me. We used PAR for longer, over the horizon tracking and CW for shorter and low-altitude tracking. I've been fascinated with radar systems ever since and always wanted to build a small, portable one at some point as I I'm an electronics engineer but my focus is on digital systems and uCs, never analog or RF. Maybe this is the chance to begin.

This will be really exciting series.

Been using the Doppler returns from VOR and ATSC tv pilot carrier signals for some experiments ... many A/C returns can be seen using waterfall type SDR receiver displays. Subbed to keep informed of your progress too. Thanks.

Great presentation style. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series!

Jon, thanks so much for your time and effort. Looking forward to all the videos

Wow - can’t wait to watch the series. Liked and subscribed 😊 Beamforming and clutter would be great to include.

Fantastic content... I hope it remains in the public realm without much difficulty.

I just found your channel and subscribed. I am a self taught "electrical engineer" specializing in vacuum tube high-end audio, particularly custom transformers, although in the course of my studies I came to really love math and electronics generally. I look forward to learning and working along with this project!

I don't think I can afford the phaser. But this clip's got me interested, so I'm gonna keep tabs on this playlist. Thanks man for all the references, sure helps!

Outstanding video Jon. I write a lot of software and am fascinated by the combined engineering and software problem that is RADAR. I've been playing around with Vayyar's Walabot dev kit and its pretty robust and powerful. Still, I'd love to see more of this tech in the hobbyist/maker world, so these videos are an amazing resource.

Very interesting. Being a retired math guy with a love of radio astronomy and radio in general I will definitely follow your series. From the two prices I looked up, Pluto, & two low noise amplifiers, which together sums to about $360 & by guessing the mixers are not terribly pricey & guessing the phaser might add another $200 to the whole it's not terribly cost prohibitive. Especially if pursued over time. Regardless of whether I attempt to build a system which I'd love to do Pluto has really caught my attention & I think its on my next radio gear list. Look forward to the sequence & thanks for documenting & sharing.

Excellent video and information. Looking forward to the next video parts.

Great teach and presentation skills! Can't wait to see the other videos!

so excited for this series, thanks a lot

Awesome. If I can find a phaser I’ll be building this along with you. Can’t wait.

This is cool as hell. Subscribed to see these builds. Thanks for breaking it down.

Stumbled your channel by accident and found your delivery of contents very excellent. Such a complex field to grasp and understand you made it quite approachable and motivational. Remember the late Mr Jon Pease who delivered complex hardware into understandable real applications. Maybe a suggestion to explain math equations found in text books into real applications. Liked and subscribed

This is the best series on youtube!!

this guy has tim and eric confidence, great vid

Happy new year! A very exciting project - a great start to 2024!

So good as always, perhaps some SAR, though that may be outside of the scope of this series. Though just the SAR algorithms are fascinating. The best radar channel on youtube, thanks!

Fascinating subject! For a future video, I would be curious about a directional passive radar, but maybe I can figure it out from this series. Thanks!

Oh this is gonna be right up my alley, thanks for this!

am looking forward to seeing more of this video, thanks @Jon

This is next level!

I'm hyped for this

Great channel. Will be fun to go through your other videos. Subscribed. Cheers ...

This is awesome. I'd love to see a focus on calibration and adc frontends, mixers, gain budgets

Excellent thank you. I have no idea about radar so this will be a wonderful resource for my learning

I had this claim time ago and said you I wanted this , Oh my GOD what a present

AEWSOME! looking forward to more videos

Amazing Dear Jon Kraft

I work in digital design. Recently, due to project requirements, I had to learn more about embedded systems, specifically SDR. Actually, I feel a bit bored with this field. However, luckily I came across your channel. Keep it up, sir 🔥

Sounds fantastic.

Thank you for putting this together. Appreciated!

Nice, my best friend works at analog devices too so maybe I should send him this, its a wonderful project!

Love this topic glad i found your channel.

No way.. exactly what im trying to do, here in Ukraine, Odesa. Some sort of early alarm for Iranian/Russian UAV (shahed-136, shaded-129)... Really hope I will make it..

Holy crap yourube recomended part 3 of this series a hundred times i had to search for part 1 - it just seemed logical to see part 1 before part 2 or 3.

looking forward to the series

Ive searched for such a project!

Amazing....continue thw work..hoping to see lot more in the coming days

I have just run across this channel, and subscribed! An idea for a future project: Create a similar system that can do ground radar, to look several hundred feet into the ground, using an array of ground probes, to detect anomalies deep below the surface, such as water, or minerals, etc.

Amazing presentation! Thank you!

This what i am interested in!!! pure hobby

ok this is cool as hell. thanks for this video was really informative and fun.

thanks u; can't wait for upcoming videos

This looks like a very interesting series, I am looking forward to the rest of the videos. I wonder if it will be possible to make it small enough for mounting on a drone for Detect And Avoid (DAA) systems to help safely fly beyond visual line of sight.

Great production! Subscribed!

About time! I LOVE YOUR VIDEOS! ❤❤❤❤❤

Great video A lot to learn

This is amazing. We are tying to build a low cost fmcw radar for Indian road safety.

Thank you for sharing!

awesome video always wanted to make my own little radar

"As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" I've found a wise man. Subscribed!

Great idea. Thanks for sharing

Thanks for the video. Most drones emit themselves quite well (video and telemetry). Accordingly, do you have plans for a passive radar(detector) with RC protocol identification?:)

Awesome project, God bless my man :)

Thank you. This is great . You are generous.

Thank you very much, this sounds like a fun project!

Well done

This is so awesome!

Looking forward to it! Subscribed. Edit: Please stick with Python instead of MATLAB for video 6!

Incredible.

This is very interesting. These are golden for hobbyists and amateurs to create something new. I can already think purpose like detecting a rodents or other harmful animals for farmers and have a systems to scare them off based to that.

Very great!!

Very cool. As for future ideas, maybe using multiple radars to triangulate position?

This is awesome! Thank you

I say a very humble and gracious thank you for the help and support. I'm so glad to have found the videos and once again I know it's only words but I really do appreciate the hard work put into these videos. More and more things like this need to be taught from a young age. I wonder can you recommend any software for a android user or maybe windows that I can carry out simulation builds. Before anyone thinks come on there is loads that's my problem which to use, I hate the thought of committing to a particular platform to then find it's not suitable. Also imagine when vr and augmented reality allow us to simulate all of this.