Abstract:

Airborne fire control radar with conformal antennas array offers many advantages over conventional one with planar antenna array, such as less payload weight, larger effective aperture and increased field of view, without mechanically canting or rotating the array. The airborne fire control radar with conformal antennas array is analyzed in terms of subarray division, clutter characteristics and clutter suppression, etc. Firstly, the mathematical model and geometry configuration of conformal antennas array are given, and the manners of subarray division and working are obtained based on the requirement for the moved target detection of airborne fire control radar, and the properties of conformal antennas array pattern are analyzed. Secondly, the clutter spectrum distribution in space-time plane is analyzed. Finally, the clutter suppression performance of existing space time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques for practice is compared, and the minimum detectable velocity of airborne fire control radar with conformal antennas array is shown.