Scope of Standards and Conventions

Phased Array System Toolbox™ software uses consistent conventions with respect to units of measure, data representations, and coordinate systems. You must understand these conventions to use the toolbox.

Complex-Valued Baseband Signals

In phased array signal processing, it is common to shift the frequency content of a waveform to support effective radiation and propagation in the medium. You accomplish this task by modulating a baseband signal with nonzero spectral magnitudes in the vicinity of zero frequency to create a bandpass signal with nonzero spectral magnitudes centered around a carrier frequency. Typically, the bandwidth of the baseband signal is small compared to the carrier frequency resulting in a narrowband signal. To process returned signals, the receiver demodulates the bandpass signal to the baseband. The demodulation involves local oscillators both in phase and 90 degrees out of phase with the modulating carrier frequency. This demodulation results in in-phase I and quadrature Q baseband signals, or channels. For processing, it is convenient to create a complex-valued baseband signal by assigning the I channel to be the real part and the Q channel to be the imaginary part, I+jQ.

This software uses the complex-valued baseband representation to represent both transmitted and received signals. Actual phased array systems transmit real-valued signals and create complex-valued baseband signals only at the receiver. However, you can use a complex-valued representation at all stages. Doing so enables you to accurately model the effect of system gains, losses, and interference on the received signal samples.

Data Organization of Baseband Signals

You can use this software to efficiently implement space-time processing of complex-valued baseband samples by organizing the data in a three-dimensional matrix. See Radar Data Cube for an explanation of how the software organizes space-time data.

Spatial Coordinates

Representation of position in three dimensions is a fundamental aspect of array signal processing. This software specifies rectangular and spherical coordinates as column vectors with respect to both global and local origins. For a detailed explanation of the conventions, see:

Physical Quantities

This software uses the International System of Units (SI) almost exclusively for measurement. In addition, there are physical constants declared and used in calculations. See Units of Measure and Physical Constants for a detailed explanation of the conventions.

Supported Data Types

This software supports double-precision data types in all objects blocks, and functions. Some objects and blocks support single-precision data types.

Functions supporting single precision