Coupling-Cancellation-Antenna for Improving Doppler Radar Motion Measurement Accuracy

One of the challenges in direct conversion Doppler radar lies in the dc offset resulted from antenna coupling. The dc offset may saturate the baseband amplifiers, preventing sufficient amplification of the received signal. In this work, a Coupling-Cancellation-Antenna (CCA) was implemented in the radar front end to enhance radar detection accuracy by minimizing the TX-RX antenna coupling. The idea is to have two transmitting antennas fed by signals with 180° phase difference such that the two signals cancel at the RX antenna. As a result, a larger receiver gain can be used to improve the signal to noise ratio without saturating the baseband output. Experimental validations of the CCA concept demonstrate 37-dB reduction in the TX-RX coupling. Furthermore, the CCA method reduces the detection error from 15.8% to 2.4%.