Radar has been widely used for various purposes such as monitoring atmospheric precipitation. For that purpose, it gives more accurate results than satellites do. Previous research has developed navigation radar that alters its functions into an atmospheric precipitation monitoring radar. To improve the development of the radar, an antenna system will be developed in this research. The purpose of developing this antenna is to obtain better data reception results. This antenna is a microstrip rectangular array antenna that works on X-band with a frequency of 9.41 GHz. Microstrip antenna is chosen since it has several advantages such as small dimensions and relatively low costs. The designed antenna gain ≥ 12 dB, bandwidth of 60 MHz, and horizontal polarization. Antenna fabrication produces a microstrip rectangular 16 x 1 array antenna using the mitered bend method at a frequency of 9.4 GHz with a reflection coefficient of -22.8 dB, VSWR of 1.2, gain of 13.21 dB, unidirectional radiation patterns and horizontal polarization.
An improved rain detection system has been developed using a marine radar. The rain detection system is composed of a Furuno 1932 Mark II marine radar (radar scanner and display units), a radar control circuit, a signal conditioning circuit, an analog to digital converter (ADC), and a computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). The combination of the microcontroller and optocoupler in the radar control circuit was able to replace the omnipad and pushbutton control and it was also employed to activate the radar and the sector blanket mode. The signal conditioning circuit along with the ADC and the clutter removal made the video and navigation signals from the display unit become ADC-counted rain data. By comparing the ADC-counted rain data of the Furuno marine radar with the reflectivity obtained by GMR X Band weather radar, it was found that the Furuno rain detection sensitivity only spans from 30-55 dBZ.
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