A DDS approach to simulate velocity profiles of sport projectiles for X-band Doppler radars

This paper evaluates the development and performance of a Doppler simulator to simulate the velocity profile of sport projectiles. The Doppler simulator acts as a passive device that comprises an Arduino Due microcontroller, RF mixer, and an X-band patch array antenna. Using measured golf ball projectiles from an X-Band Doppler radar, an empirical approach is taken to model the velocity profiles. The method is developed on the Arduino Due microntroller, which uses the modeled velocity profiles to simulate the Doppler shift on the retransmitted signal. A strong correlation is shown between the velocity profiles of simulated and measured projectiles. For three different types of golf shot projectiles, that range from 50 to 15 m/s, the average error between the simulated and measured trajectories is -0.169 m/s, while the standard deviation is 0.28 m/s.