Fast pulsed radar reflectometry for the Textor tokamak

Progress in fusion research shows an increasing demand for diagnostics with high temporal and spatial resolution in order to study small and fast phenomena in fusion plasmas. Therefore, a new ten-channel pulsed radar reflectometer is under development for the TEXTOR Tokamak, to measure electron density profiles in the range of 0.4-4 X 10(19) m(-3) at a high repetition rate of 2 MHz. An additional feature of this diagnostic is the possibility to perform correlation measurements at 10 MHz repetition rate to investigate density fluctuations. The reflectometer will scan the plasma with 1-ns-long radar pulses in the 18-57 GHz range. In spite of the long flight time of the pulses of about 100 ns, the above mentioned high repetition rates could be achieved by time multiplexing the generation and reception of the radar pulses. Temporal selection of the received pulses is performed by fast switching of the local oscillators inputs of the heterodyne receiver, to generate time windows in which the reception of the reflected pulses is expected. An embedded VME controller will manage the system and store the data with a speed of 20 Msamples/s, up to a maximum of 64 Mbyte data per plasma shot. In order to facilitate the handling of such a huge amount of data, an advanced data reduction scheme is being developed. Remote operation with a fast data link from FZ Julich (Germany) to FOM Nieuwegein (The Netherlands) will be possible. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0034-6748(99)68001-7].