// the find
NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR
Open-source, low-cost 10.5 GHz PLFM phased array RADAR system
AERIS-10 is a full open hardware and firmware stack for a 10.5 GHz phased array radar, with two variants: a 3km patch-array version and a 20km slotted-waveguide version with GaN power amplifiers. It's aimed at RF/radar researchers, drone-related SDR builders, and advanced makers who want to actually build and modify radar hardware, not just simulate it.
The hardware is genuinely complete, not a paper design: schematics, gerbers, BOM/CPL for every board (power, frequency synthesis, main RF, PA, antenna arrays) plus FPGA source and STM32 firmware. The signal chain goes past the RF front end into real processing — pulse compression, Doppler FFT, MTI, CFAR on the FPGA — which most hobbyist radar projects skip. Bias control on the 16-channel PA array is closed-loop (per-channel Idq/Vg calibration against thermistor and current-sense feedback), which is the kind of detail that separates a working RF design from one that just looks right on paper.
The core schematics and PCB layouts are in a proprietary EDA format (Eagle .brd/.sch, plus AutoCAD .dwg for the waveguide), so anyone without an Eagle or Fusion 360 license can't open or modify the boards despite the open-hardware framing. It's explicitly alpha with no standalone assembly guide — you're expected to reconstruct build order from schematics and BOM yourself. Bringing up a 10.5 GHz, 16-channel beamforming design (let alone the 10W GaN PA variant) needs a VNA, spectrum analyzer, and real RF assembly experience that the stated prerequisite of 'basic understanding of radar principles' badly undersells. It's also a single-maintainer project where the author explicitly says they can't guarantee responses — a real bus-factor risk given the complexity.