Радиофизика и электроника (Mar 2018)

USING THE MATRIX PENCIL METHOD FOR RADAR MEASUREMENT OF AN ELEVATION ANGLE OF LOW-ALTITUDE TARGETS OVER AGITATED SEA

  • Yu. A. Pedenko

DOI
https://doi.org/10.15407/rej2018.01.010
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 23, no. 1
pp. 10 – 18

Abstract

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The paper focuses on the problem of increasing the accuracy of radar measurements of the elevation angle of the low-altitude targets over the sea. The Matrix Pencil method, as one of the means to resolve this problem, is studied in the paper. This method refers to the methods of high spectral resolution, but in a number of publications, the possibility of its use for measuring the angles of arrival of radio waves is also considered. However, the extent of its suitability for solving the problem needs to be studied taking into account the specific conditions under which the measurement of the elevation angles of low-altitude targets is performed. The research was carried out by computer simulation. It covered the sea states with the conditions of both specular and strong diffuse reflection satisfied. One of the main goals of this work was to determine ultimate measurement accuracy achieved by the method when only the diffuse reflection from the sea is considered as a disturbance (a specular signal along with a direct signal from the target are considered as a measured signal). It was established that by this indicator the Matrix Pencil method does not concede to the well-known MUSIC method, but even exceeds it, especially for strong diffuse reflection (improvement reaches 20%). Another impor-tant task was to investigate the influence of the a priori parameters of the method on the measurement errors: the number of measured signals, the values of the so-called pencil-parameter and the number of spatial samples of the signal at the given antenna aperture. As a result, recommen-dations on the selection of these parameters have been developed, which make it possible to minimize the errors in the measurement of the elevation angles. This research expands the understanding of ways to increase the accuracy of mea-suring the angles of low-altitude targets over an agitated sea.

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