Date of Award

3-2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Todd B. Hale, PhD

Abstract

This research effort examines side-looking airborne radar operation in hot clutter. In this context, hot clutter is an electronic counter-measure used to degrade airborne radar performance. Hot clutter occurs by illuminating the ground with an airborne jammer at some velocity, azimuth, elevation, and range from the airborne radar. This research uses a simplifying assumption where the bistatic hot clutter radar cross section (RCS) scattering statistics are identical to the monostatic clutter RCS scattering statistics. When the airborne jammer waveform scattered returns are perfectly coherent with the radar waveform, the radar cannot distinguish between the returns transmitted by the jammer and returns transmitted by the radar. Hot clutter is shown to degrade radar performance at different locations in azimuth and Doppler depending on the jammer velocity and location in the radar environment. The Joint Domain Localized (JDL) and Factored Time Space (FTS) adaptive filters are shown to improve radar performance in hot clutter when compared to non- adaptive processing. Adaptive filters can mitigate hot clutter not in the radar look direction. FTS and JDL adaptive filters are shown to improve radar performance 32 and 36 dB per element per pulse, respectively, over non-adaptive processing in the jammer mainbeam Doppler location when the jammer mainbeam is not in the radar look direction in azimuth. JDL and FTS adaptive filter performance are shown only to degrade at locations of hot clutter in the radar look direction in azimuth and Doppler. In addition, the sample support is no longer independently and identically distributed (iid) when the jammer is close to the range cell under test (RUT). This research shows if the sample support used to create adaptive filters occupies a small range extent, the interference estimate used to create adaptive filters is not seriously corrupted due to heterogeneities within the sample support.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GE-ENG-06-33

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