# mGEODAR--A Mobile Radar System for Detection and Monitoring of Gravitational Mass-Movements
## 5 Conclusions  
We present the hardware of a custom-build mobile FMCW radar system for the purpose of detecting, monitoring and measuring gravitationally driven geophysical mass-movements such as snow avalanches. We anticipate that very similar radars will be employed in the future to monitor other natural mass movements like debris flow, rock fall and also very rare pyroclastic density currents on volcano flanks. However, the development of such mass-movement detection radars definitively benefits from snow avalanche research as these flows can be triggered manually and occur comparably more frequent throughout the complete winter season. Thus, the hardware, software settings and real-time processing algorithms can be developed more easily for snow avalanches and later adopted to match the other mentioned flow types that are sporadic natural events and usually exhibit a complex transient signature in time and space. Indeed, more research is required in feature recognition algorithms on the range-time data to differentiate a mass movement event from other moving targets such as waving trees in the field of view.  
For various measurement locations in rapid response to changing climate and snow conditions, the presented optimization procedure will prove useful to quickly find the optimal frequency settings for any new measurement location. We see a main advantage of the procedure, that basically sweeps through the full valid frequencies of the hardware, without the need for additional sensitive laboratory equipment. Employing solely the radar hardware and capability of the analog-digital converter ensures that the complete signal chain, the cabling and antenna orientations as well as potential external noise sources are optimally taken into account at each location.  
Even though no natural avalanches could be recorded until now, the presented tests and results of a non-distributed moving target are promising, however, further evaluation on real events is needed. In the future, the data acquisition and processing will be further optimized for computational speed and efficiency. A next step will be the development of a hardware-based FMCW processing using FPGA technology rather than software-based offline processing which requires decent computing power and energy consumption. Beside the flexible usage cases for the radar, the overall costs of all mGEODAR hardware components are around 10 k Euro and will promote the wide use of radar technology in mass-movement and general environmental monitoring, detection and measurements across various disciplines and as ground-truthing for satellite based radar remote sensing of, for example, the snow cover properties.  
Conceptualization, A.K. and J.-T.F.; methodology, A.K. and L.B.L.; software, A.K., S.F. and N.P.; validation, A.K., S.F. and L.B.L.; formal analysis, A.K.; investigation, A.K. and S.F.; resources, J.-T.F. and L.B.L.; data curation, A.  
**Acknowledgments:** The authors acknowledge the invaluable technical support by the BFW staff and namely [PERSON] for the help with the initial installation of the radar system. Many thanks are devoted to [PERSON] for connecting the UCL and BFW research groups. We thank [PERSON] (MCI) and [PERSON] (Uni Innsbruck) for providing their mechatronic laboratories and facilities.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.