Rejection of Surface Clutter in Far Sidelobes for Airborne Radars

Abstract

In airborne radar, false alarms caused by surface clutter returns through antenna sidelobes need to be suppressed to detect the target of interest. Sidelobe blanking is widely used to reject false alarms. Ideally, an auxiliary antenna radiation pattern should cover entire sidelobes of the main antenna radiation pattern. However, this may not always be satisfied, especially in the case of far sidelobes (FSL) of the main antenna, for various reasons. In this work, rejection techniques for false alarms caused by surface clutter returns through FSL are proposed. The distortion of the measured angle and velocity of the surface clutter are explained, and a measurement process for estimating the true location and velocity of the clutter is derived. Subsequently, two techniques for false alarm rejection are presented. The first technique is based on the look-up table (LUT) of FSL, which is robust but not practical due to the time and cost required to build a LUT with sufficient resolution. In the second technique, false alarms are rejected when they satisfy predefined criteria derived from their common characteristics, and flight test results confirm that false alarms can be effectively rejected by applying the second technique.

Keywords

• airborne radar
• electronically scanned array antenna
• false alarm rejection
• sidelobe blanking
• surface clutter