APPLICATIONS OF RADIO DETECTION AND RANGING (RADAR)

Radars can be classified by frequency band, use, or platform, for example, ground based, shipborne, airborne, or spaceborne. Radars generally operate in the microwave regime although HF over-the horizon (OTH) radars such as JINDALEE, OTHB, and ROTHR use similar principles in bouncing signals from the ionosphere to achieve long-range coverage.

Radars are often denoted by the letter band of operation, for example, L-band (1–2 GHz), S-band (2–4 GHz), C-band (4–8 GHz), and X-band (8–12 GHz). Some classifications of radar are based on propagation mode (e.g., monostatic, bistatic, OTH, underground) or on scan method (mechanical, electronic, multibeam).

Other classifications of radar are based on the waveform and processing, for example, pulse Doppler (PD), continuous wave (CW), FM/CW, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) or impulse (wideband video).

Radars are often classified by their use: weather radar, police speed detection, navigation, precision approach radar, airport surveillance and air route surveillance, radio astronomy, fire control and weapon direction, terrain mapping and avoidance, missile fuzing, missile seeker, foliage penetration, subsurface or ground penetrating, acquisition, orbital debris, range instrumentation, imaging (e.g., SAR/ISAR), etc.

Search (or surveillance) radars are concerned with detection of targets out to long range and low elevation angles to allow adequate warning on pop-up low-flying targets (e.g., sea skimmers). Since the search radar is more concerned with detection (i.e., presence or absence of targets) and can accommodate cruder accuracy in estimating target parameters such as azimuth angle, elevation angle, and range, search radars tend to have poorer range and angle accuracy than tracking radars.

The frequency tends to be lower than track radars since RF power and antenna aperture are less expensive and frequency stability is better. Broad beams (e.g., fan beam) allow faster search of the volume.

To first order, the radar search performance is driven by the power-aperture product (PA) to search the volume with a given probability of detection (PD) in a specified frame time. PA actually varies slightly in that to maintain a fixed false alarm rate per scan, more beam positions offer more opportunities for false alarms and, hence, the detection threshold must be raised, which increases the power to achieve the specified PD.

With a phased-array antenna (i.e., electronically scanned beam), the probability of false alarm can be optimized by setting a high false alarm in the search beam and using a verify beam with higher threshold to confirm whether a search detection was an actual target or just a false alarm.

The lower threshold in search allows less search power with some fraction of beams requiring the extra verify beams. The net effect on total required transmit power can be a reduction using this optimization technique.

Search radars tend to use a fan beam or stacked receive beams to reduce the number of beam positions allowing more time in the beam for coherent processing to reduce clutter. Fill pulses are sometimes used to allow good clutter cancellation on second- or higher time-around clutter returns.

Track radars tend to operate at higher frequency and have better accuracy, that is, narrower beams and high range resolution. Simple radars track a single target with an early–late range tracker, Doppler speed gate, and conical scan or sequential lobing.More advanced angle trackers use monopulse or conical scan on receive only (COSRO) to deny inverse modulation by repeater jammers.

The multifunction phased-array radar can be programmed to conduct searches with track beams assigned to individual detected targets. The tracks are maintained in track files. If time occupancy becomes a problem, the track pulses can be machine gunned out at the targets in range order, and on receive they are gathered in one after the other since the track window on each target is quite small.

In mechanically rotated systems, track is often a part of search, for example, track-while-scan (TWS). A plot extractor clusters the primitive returns in range Doppler angle from a given target to produce a single plot.

The plots are associated with the track files using scan-to-scan correlation gates. The number of targets that can be handled in a TWS system is limited by data processing rather than track power.