Digital processing of bandpass signals

Modern radar and radio systems rely on digital signal processing to enhance the quality of received signals. Prior to such processing, these signals must be converted to digital form. The historical development of signal digitization is briefly discussed in this paper and leads to a description of some current work on digital mixing. A method of directly sampling a band-limited intermediate frequency (i.f.) signal is presented, using a pair of digital mixer channels to produce complex low-pass samples of the signal envelope. The method is found to produce well matched channel outputs. Finally, the applicability of the method to radar is discussed.