TABLE OF CONTENTS There is much interest in high speed array radar systems for mine detection and work is being carried out on various national (US, UK, Germany, France) as well as international CEU programmes. Arrays are typically between 1 and 4 m in width and can operate at speeds up to 10 kmh -1. While not exhaustive, this Section gives some idea of the different approaches that are being taken to vehicle mounted mine detection using GPR. There are several options that can be considered in terms of design. The radar can look down into the ground or it can look ahead in forward-look mode. The latter is obviously preferable operationally as it removes the need for the vehicle to have overpass capability.
There is potentially a restriction on system performance for forward-look radars. If it is supposed that at or greater than the Brewster angle there is no reflected signal, then a radar looking forward will no longer be able to detect buried targets in the ground when the angle of the boresight of the radar exceeds the critical Brewster angle. If this is true, then for a given height, the performance of the radar will be set by the relative dielectric constant of the ground and the radar forward velocity. The braking distance in metres of a vehicle on a concrete road is given by
| (12.1) |  |
where ? = speed in kmh -1.
It can be shown that the effective range of the vehicle...
