The application of subsurface radar using electromagnetic waves in the VHF band is wide and includes surveying voids under the ground and archaeological prospecting. To achieve a wider application range, the survey depth must be deeper. In this paper, a method of pulse compression using a chirp signal as one of the methods to fulfill this requirement is described, and its advantages and problems are discussed. First, a delay correlation method is proposed as a processing method of pulse compression. It converts RF band chirp signal directly into a pulse. Moreover, the method improves the S/N ratio by over 40 dB compared with conventional pulse radar. Therefore, it has the same detection ability as conventional pulse radar even though it uses less transmitting power. Next, the influences of RF amplifier saturation and underground propagation characteristics on the chirp signal are discussed; both are shown to have little influence on the detection ability of the method.

The use of a chirp signal is one of the methods to expand the detection range in subsurface radar. However, the presence of time-sidelobes after a conventional pulse-compression makes the detection range degraded because weak signals from underground objects are covered with a large time-sidelobe due to a ground surface reflection. In this paper, we propose a new pulse compression subsurface radar using a short chirp signal in which the echoes from the ground surface and the object are not overlapped. We show that the short chirp signal can improve the detection ability compared with a conventional chirp signal and examine the influence that the decreases of the signal duration and the compression ratio exert on the detection range. By the new pulse compression subsurface radar, the steel pipes buried down to 5 m in depth can be detected.