A hardware platform and software architecture based on software radio technology is presented and applied to the design of radar altimeter receiver in this paper. According to this structure, we set up a system consisting of two circuit boards, one is ground echo generator using FPGA as core chip, the other is signal processor and adopting a combination scheme of DSP and FPGA which has a coherent and an incoherent channel independent of each other to have strong robust capabilities, the flow chart of software is also given. The experimental results show the method is simple and feasible, it could not only give height and velocity information, but also decrease time to market and thus quickly meet the demand of end-user.
